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THE GATES AJAR. 



BT 



ELIZABETH STUART (pHEL' ^ 



A 



" Splendor I I mm.. 
* little defiiute ha^.. ' 





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C. A, 


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^ O o i U N : 
JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY, 

Late Tickxor & Fields, and Fields, Osgood, & Co. 
1873. 






Entered according to Act of Congress, in the yeax x2SS, by 

FIELDS, OSGOOD, & CO., 

b the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of MassachuMttR 



^^mr^- or Supreme Council 



University Press: Welch, Bigelow, & Co., 
Cambridge, 



To my father, whose life, like a perfume from be- 
yond the Gates, penetrates every life which approaches 
it, the readers of this little book will owe whatever 
pleasant thing they may fmd within its pages. 

E. S. P. 

Andover, October 22, 186S. 



THE GATES AJAR. 



I. 

|NE week; only one week to-day, this 
twenty-first of February. 

I have been sitting here in the dark and 
thinking about it, till it seems so horribly long 
and so horribly short ; it has been such a week 
to live through, and it is such a small part of 
the weeks that must be lived through, that I 
could think no longer, but lighted my lamp 
and opened my desk to find something to "do. 

I was tossing my paper about, — only my 
own : the packages in the yellow envelopes I 
have not been quite brave enough to open yet, 
— ^when I came across this poor little book 
in which I used to keep memoranda of the 
weather, and my lovers, when I v/as a school- 
girl. I turned the leaves, smiling to see how 
many blank pages were left and took up my 
pen, and now I am not smiling any more. 

If it had not come exactly as it did, it seems 
to me as if I could bear it better. They tell 

I A 



2 The Gates Ajar. 

me that it should not have been such a shock. 
" Your brother had been in the army so long 
that you should have been prepared for any- 
thing. Everybody knows by what a hair a 
soldier's life is always hanging," and a great 
deal more that I am afraid I have not listened 
to. I suppose it is all true ; but that never 
makes it any easier. 

The house feels like a prison. I walk up 
and down and wonder that I ever called it 
home. Something is the matter with the 
sunsets ; they come and go, and I do not no- 
tice them. Something ails the voices of the 
children, snowballing down the street ; all the 
music has gone out of them, and they hurt me 
like knives. The harmless, happy childrdn ! — 
and Roy loved the little children. 

Why, it seems to me as if the world were 
spinning around in the light and wind and 
laughter, and God just stretched down His 
hand one morning and put it out. 

It was such a dear, pleasant world to be put 
out ! 

It was never dearer or more pleasant than it 
was on that morning. I had not been as happy 
for weeks. I came up from the Post-Office 
singing to myself His letter was so bright 



The Gates Ajar. 3 

and full of mischief ! I had not had one like 
it all the winter. I have laid it away by itself, 
filled with his jokes and pet names, " Mamie " 
or " Queen Mamie" every other line, and signed 
" Until next time, your happy 

" Roy." 

I wonder if all brothers and sisters keep up 
the baby-names as we did. I wonder if I shall 
ever become used to living without them. 

I read the letter over a great many times, 
and stopped to tell Mrs. Bland the news in it, 
and wondered what had kept it so long on the 
\vay, and wondered if it could be true that he 
would have a furlough in May. It seemed too 
good to be true. If I had been fourteen in- 
stead of twenty-four, I should have jumped up 
and down and clapped j'ny hands there in the 
street. The sky was so bright that I could 
scarcely turn up my eyes to look at it. The 
sunshine was shivered into little lances all over 
the glaring white crust. There was a snow- 
bird chirping and pecking ori the maple-tree as 
I came in. 

I went up and opened my windqw ; sat down 
by it and drew a long breath, and began to 
count tlie days till May. I must have sat there 
as much as half an hour. I was so happy 



4 The Gates Ajar. 

counting the days that I did not hear the front 
gate, and when I looked down a man stood 
there, — a great, rough man, — who shouted up 
that he was in a hurry, and wanted seventy- 
five cents for a telegram that he had brought 
over from East Homer. I believe I went down 
and paid him, sent him away, came up here 
and locked the door before I read it. 

Phoebe found me here at dinner-time. 

If I could have gone to him, could have 
busied myself with packing and journeying, 
could have been forced to think and plan, 
could have had the shadow of a hope of one 
more look, one word, I suppose I should have 
taken it differently. Those two words — " Shot 
dead " — shut me up and walled me in, as I 
think people must feel shut up and walled in, in 
Hell. I write the words most solemnly, for 
I know that there has been Hell in my heart. 

It is all over now. He came back, and they 

brought him up the steps, and I listened to 

their feet, — so many feet ; he used to come 

bounding in. They let me see him for a mm- 

ute, and thej;e was a funeral, and Mrs. Bland 

came over, and she and Phoebe attended to 

everything, I suppose. I did not notice noi 

think till we had left him out there in the cold 

K 



The Gates Ajar. 5 

and had come back. The windows of his room 
were opened, and the bitter wind swept in. 
The house was still and damp. Nobody was 
there to welcome me. Nobody would ever 

l-fc^ 9^ v^ ^r 5|c 

Poor old Phoebe ! I had forgotten her. She 
was waiting at the kitchen window in her black 
bonnet ; she took off my things and made me 
a cup of tea, and kept at work near me for a 
little while, wiping her eyes. She came in joist 
now, when I had left my unfinished sentence 
to dry, sitting here with my face in my hands. 

" Laws now, Miss Mary, my dear ! " This 
won't never do, — a rebellin' agin Providence, 
and singein' your hair on the lamp chimney 
this way ! The dining-room fire 's goin' beau- 
tiful, and the salmon is toasted to a brown. 
Put away them papers and come right along I " 



^ 



The Gates Ajar, 



II. 

Febiuary 23d. 

Who originated that most exquisite of inqui- 
sitions, the condolence system ? 

A solid blow has in itself the elements of its 
rebound ; it arouses the antagonism of the life 
on which it falls ; its relief is the relief of a 
combat 

But a hundred little needles pricking at us, — 
what is to be done with them ? The hands 
hang down, the knees are feeble. We cannot 
bO much as gasp, because they are little nee- 
dles. 

I know that there are those who like these 
calls ; but why, in the name of all sweet pity, 
must we endure them without respect of per- 
sons, as we would endure a wedding reception 
or make a party-call ? 

Perhaps I write excitedly and hardly. I feel 
excited and hard. 

I am sure I do not mean to be ungrateful 
for real sorrowful sympathy, however imper- 



71te Gates Ajar. ^ 7 

fectly it may be shown, or that near friends (if 
one has them), cannot give, in such a time as 
this, actual strength, even if they fail of com- 
fort, by look and tone and love. But it is not 
near friends who are apt to wound, nor real 
sympathy which sharpens the worst of the 
needles. It is the fact that all your chance 
acquaintances feel called upon to bring their 
curious eyes and jarring words right into the 
silence of your first astonishment ; taking you 
in a round of morning calls with kid gloves 
and parasol, and the liberty to turn your heart 
about and cut into it at pleasure. You may 
quiver at every touch, but there is no escape, 
because it is " the thing." 

For instance : Meta Tripp came in this 
afternoon, — I have refused myself to every- 
body but Mrs. Bland, before, but Meta caught 
me in the parlor, and there was no escape. 
She had come, it was plain enough, because 
she must, and she had come early, because, she 
too having lost a brother in the war, she 
was expected to be very sorry for me. Very 
likely she was, and very likely she did the best 
she knew how, but she was — not as uncom- 
fortable as I, but as uncomfortable as she could 
be, and was evidently glad when it was over. 



8 The Gates Ajar. 

She observed, as she went out, that I should n't 
feel so sad by and by. She felt very sad at 
first when Jack died, but everybody got ovei 
that after a time. The girls were going to sew 
for the Fair next week at Mr. Quirk's, and she 
hoped I would exert myself and come. 
.Ah, well : — . 

•* First learn to love one living man, 
Then mayst thou think upon the dead." 

It is not that the child is to be blamed for 
not knowing enough to stay away ; but her 
coming here has made me wonder whether I 
am different from other women ; why Roy 
was so much more to me than many brothers 
are to many sisters. I think it must be that 
there never was another like Roy. Then we 
have lived together so long, we two alone, since 
father died, that he had grown to me, heart 
of my heart, and life of my life. It did not 
seem as if he coidd be taken, and I be left. 

Besides, I suppose most young women of my 
age have their dreams, and a future probable 
or possible, which makes the very incomplete- 
ness of life sweet, because of the symmetry 
which is waiting somewhere. But that was 
settled so long ago for me that it makes it very 
different. Roy was all there was. 



The Gates Ajar. g 

February 26th. 

Death and Heaven could not seem very dif- 
ferent to a Pagan from what they seem to me. 

I say this dehberately. It has been dehb- 
erately forced upon me. That of which I had 
a faint consciousness in the first shock takes 
shape now. I do not see how one with such 
thoughts in her heart as I have had can possi- 
bly be " regenerate," or stand any chance of 
ever becoming " one of the redeemed." And 
here I am, what I have been for six years, a 
member of an Evangelical church, in good and 
regular standing ! 

The bare, blank sense of physical repulsion 
from death, which was all the idea I had of 
anything when they first brought him home, 
has not gone yet. It is horrible. It was 
cruel. Roy, all I had in the wide world, — 
Roy, with the flash in his eyes, with his smile 
that lighted the house all up ; with his pretty, 
soft hair that I used to curl and kiss about my 
finger, his bounding step, his strong arms that 
folded me in and cared for me, — Roy snatched 
away in an instant by a dreadful God, and laid 
out there in the wet and snow, — in the hideous 
wet and snow, — never to kiss him, never lo 
see him any more 1 * ♦ * * 



10 The Gates Ajar. 

He was a good boy. Roy was a good boy. 
He must have gone to Heaven. But I know 
nothing about Heaven. It is very far off. In 
my best and happiest days, I never liked to 
think of it. If I were to go there, it could do 
me no good, for I should not see Roy. Or if 
by chance I should see him standing up among 
the grand, white angels, he would not be the 
old dear Roy. I should grow so tired of sing- 
ing ! Should long and fret for one little talk, 
— for I never said good by, and — 

I will stop this. 

A scrap from the German of Burger, which 
I came across to-day, shall be copied here. 

" Be calm, my child, forget thy woe, 
And think of God and Heaven j 
Christ thy Redeemer hath to thee 
Himself for comfort given. 

" O mother, mother, what is Heaven ? 
O mother, what is Hell } 
To be with Wilhelm, — that 's my Heaven ; 
Without him, — that 's my Hell." 

February 27th. 

Miss Meta Tripp, in the ignorance of ho^ 

little silly heart, has done me a great mischief. 

Phoebe prepared me for it, by observing, 



The Gates Ajar, \\ 

when she came up yesterday to dust my room, 
that " folks was all sayin' that Mary Cabot " — 
(Homer is not an aristocratic town, and Phoebe 
doffs and dons my title at her own sweet 
will) — "that Mary Cabot was dreadful low 
sencc Royal died, and had n't ought to stay 
shut up by herself, day in and day out. It 
was behaving con-trary to the will of Provi- 
dence, and very bad for her health, too." More- 
over, Mrs. Bland, who called this morning with 
her three babies, — she never is able to stir 
out of the house without those children, poor 
thing ! — lingered awkwardly on the door-steps 
as she went away, and hoped that Mary my 
dear would n't take it unkindly, "but she did 
wish that I would exert myself more to see my 
friends and receive comfort in my affliction. 
She did n't want to interfere, or bother me, 
or — but — people would talk, and — 

My good little minister's wife broke down 
all in a blush, at this point in her " porochial 
duties " (I more than suspect that her husband 
had a hand in the matter), so I took pity on 
her embarrassment, and said smiling that I 
would think about it. 

I see just how the leaven has spread. Miss 
Meta, a little overwhelmed and a good deal 



12 The Gates Ajar. 

mystified by her call here, pronounces " pool 
Mary Cabot so sad ; she would n't talk about 
Royal ; and you could n't persuade her to come 
to the Fair; and she was so sober! — why, it 
>vas dreadful ! " 

Therefore, Homer has made up its mind 
that I shall become resigned in an arithmeti- 
cal manner, and comforted according to the 
Rule of Three. 

I wish I could go away ! I wish I could go 
away and creep into the ground and die ! If 
nobody need ever speak any more words to 
me ! If anybody only knew wJiat to say ! 

Little Mrs. Bland has been very kind, and I 
thank her with all my heart. But she does 
not know. She does not understand. Her 
happy heart is bound up in her little live 
children. She never laid anybody away under 
the snow without a chance to say good by. 

As for the minister, he came, of course, as it 
was proper that he should, before the funeral, 
and once after. He is a very good man, but I 
am afraid of him, and I am glad that te has 
not come again. 

Night. 

T can only repeat and re-echo what I wrote 
this noon. If anybody knew what to say I 



The Gates Ajar. 13 

Just after supper I heard the door-bell, and, 
looking out of the window, I caught a glimpse 
of Deacon Quirk's old drab felt hat, on the 
upper step. My heart sank, but there was no 
help for me. I waited for Phoebe to bring up 
his name, desperately listening to her heavy 
steps, and letting her knock three times before 
I answered. I confess to having taken my 
hair down twice, washed my hands to a most 
unnecessary extent, and been a long time 
brushing my dress ; also to forgetting my 
handkerchief, and having to go back for it 
after I was down stairs. Deacon Quirk looked 
tired of waiting. I hope he was. 

O, what an ill-natured thing to say ! What 
is coming over me t What would Roy think ? 
What could he } 

"Good evening, Mary," said the Deacon, 
severely, when I went in. Probably he did not 
mean to speak severely, but the truth is, I 
think he was a little vexed that I had kept him 
waiting. I said good evening, and apologized 
for my delay, and sat down as far from him as 
I conveniently could. There was an awful 
silence. 

" I came in this evening," said the Deacon, 
breaking it with a cough, " I came — hem ! — 
to confer with you — " 



14 TJic Gates Ajar. 

I looked up. *• I thought somebody had 
ought to come," continued the Deacon, " to 
confer with you as a Christian brother on 
3'our spiritooal condition." 

I opened my eyes. 

" To confer with you on your spiritooal con- 
dition," repeated my visitor. " I understand 
that you have had some unfortoonate exer- 
cises of mind under your affliction, and I ob- 
ser\^ed that you absented yourself from the 
Communion Table last Sunday." 

"I did." 

" Intentionally > " 

" Intentionally." 

He seemed to expect me to say something 
more ; and, seeing that there was no help for 
it, I answered. 

" I did not feel fit to go. I should not have 
dared to go. God does not seem to me just 
now what He used to. He has dealt very bit- 
terly with me. But, however wdcked I may be, 
I wiU not mock Him. I think, Deacon Quirk, 
that I did right to stay away." 

" Well," said the Deacon, twirling his hat 
with a puzzled look, " perhaps you did But 
I don't see the excuse for any such feelings a3 
would make it necessar}'. I think it my duty 



The Gates Ajar. 15 

to tell you. Mar}', that I am sorrj* to see you in 
such a rebellious state of mind." 

I made no reply. 

"Afflictions come from God," he observed, 
looking at me as impressively as if he supposed 
that I had never heard the statement before 
* Afflictions come from God, and, however 
afflictin' or however crushin* they may be; 
it is our duty to submit to them. Glor}' in 
triboolation, St Paul says ; glory in triboola- 
Mon." 

I continued silent 

" I sympathize with you in this sad dispen- 
sation," he proceeded. "Of course you was 
very fond of Royal ; it *s natural you should 
be, quite natural — " He stopped, perplexed, I 
suppose, by something in my face. " Yes> it *s 
ver}' natural ; poor human nature sets a great 
deal by earthly props and aiiections. But it 's 
your duty, as a Christian and a church-mem- 
ber, to be resigned." 

I tapped the floor with my foot I began 
to think that I could not bear much more. 

" To be resigned, my dear young friend. 
To say ' Abba, Father,* and pray that the wiU 
of the Lord be done." 

"Deacon Quirk!" said I, "I am nat re- 



l6 The Gates Ajar. 

signed. I pray the dear Lord with all my 
heart to make me so, but I w411 not say that I 
am, until I am, — if ever that time comes. As 
for those words about the Lord's will, I would 
no more take them on my lips than I would 
blasphemy, unless I could- speak them hon- 
estly, — and that I cannot do. We had better 
talk of something else now, had we not .'* " 

Deacon Quirk looked at me. It struck me 
that he would lock very much so at a Mormon 
or a Hottentot, and I wondered whether he 
were going to excommunicate me on the spot. 

As soon as he began to speak, however, I 
saw that he was only be^'ildered, — honestly 
bewildered, and honestly shocked : I do not 
doubt that I had said bewildering and shock- 
ing things. 

" iMy friend," he said solemnly, " I shall 
pray for you and leave you in the hands of 
God. Your brother, whom He has removed 
from this earthly hfe for His own wise — " 

" We will not talk any more about Roy, if 
you please," I interrupted ; " he is happy and 
safe." 

" Hem ! — I hope so," he replied, moving 
uneasily in his chair ; " I believe he never 
made a profession of religion, but there is no 



TJie Gates Ajar, 17 

limit to the mercy of God. It is ver}'' unsafe 
for the young to think that they can rely on a 
death-bed repentance, but our God is a cove- 
nant-keeping God, and Royals mother was a 
pious woman. If you cannot say with certain- 
t}' that he is numbered among the redeemed, 
you are justified, perhaps, in hoping so." 

I turned sharply on him, but words died on 
my lips. How could I tell the man of that 
short, dear letter that came to me in Decem- 
ber, — that Roy's was no death-bed repentance, 
but the quiet, natural gro'^th of a life that had 
always been the life of the pure in heart ; of 
his manly beliefs and unselfish motives ; of 
that dawning sense of friendship with Chrisc 
of which he used to speak so modestly, dread- 
ing lest he should not be honest with himself? 
" Perhaps I ought not to call myself a Chris- 
tian," he wrote, — I learned the words by 
heart. — " and I shall make no profession to 
be such, till I am sure of it, but my life has 
not seemed to me for a long time to be my 
own. * Bought with a price * just- expresses it. 
I can point to no time at which I was con- 
scious by any revolution of feeling of * ex- 
periencing a change of heart,' but it seems to 
me that a man's heart might be changed for 

B 



1 8 The Gates Ajar, 

all that. I do not know that it is necessary 
for us to be able to watch every footprint of 
God, The way is all that concerns us, — to see 
that we follow it and Him. This I am sure 
of; and knocking about in this army life only 
convinces me of what I felt in a certain way 
before, — that it is the only way, and He the 
only guide to follow." 

But how could I say anything of this to 
Deacon Quirk I — this my sealed and sacred 
treasure, of all that Roy left me the dearest. 
At any rate I did not. It seemed both obsti- 
nate and cruel in him to come there and say 
what he had been saying. He might have 
known that I would not say that Roy had gone 
to Heaven, if — why, if there had been the 
breath of a doubt. It is a possibility of which 
I cannot rationally conceive, but I suppose that 
his name would never have passed my lips. 

So I turned away from Deacon Quirk, and 
shut my mouth, and waited for him to finish. 
Whether the idea began to struggle into his 
mind that he might not have been making a 
very comforting remark, I cannot say ; but he 
started very soon to go. 

" Supposing you are right, and Royal was 
saved at the eleventh hour," he said at part- 



The Gates Ajar, 19 

ing, with one of bis stolid efforts to be con- 
solatory, that are worse than his rebukes, 
"if he is singing the song of Moses and the 
Lamb (he pointed with his big, dingy thumb 
at the ceiling), lie does n't rebel against the 
doings of Providence. All his affections are 
subdued to God, -*- merged, as you might say, 
— merged in worshipping before the great 
White Throne. He does n't think this mis- 
er'ble earthly spere of any importance, com- 
pared with that eternal and exceeding weight 
of glory. In the appropriate words of the 
poet, — 

O, not to one created thing 

Shall our embrace be given, 
But all our joy shall be in God, 

For only God is Heaven.* 

Those are very spiritooal and scripteral lines, 
and it *s very proper to reflect how true they 
are. 

I saw him go out, and came up here and 
locked myself in, and have been walking round 
and round the room. I must have walked a 
good while, for I feel as weak as a baby. 

Can the man in any state of existence be 
made to comprehend that he has been hold- 
iifg me on the rack this whole evening? 



20 The Gates Ajar. 

Yet he came under a strict sense of duty, 
and in the kindness of all the heart he has ! I 
know, or I ought to know, that he is a good 
man, — far better in the sight of God to-night, 
I do not doubt, than I am. 

But it hurts, — it cuts, — that thing which he 
said as he went out ; because I suppose it must 
be true ; because it seems to me greater than 
I can bear to have it true. 

Roy, away in that dreadful Heaven, can have 
no thought of me, cannot remember how I 
loved him, how he left me all alone. The sing- 
ing and the worshipping must take up all his 
time. God wants it all. He is a "Jealous 
God." I am nothing any more to Roy. 

March 2. 

And once I was much, — very much to him! 

His Mamie, his poor Queen Mamie, — dearer, 
he used to say, than all the world to him, — I 
don't see how he can like it so well up there as 
to forget her. Though Roy was a very good 
boy. But this poor, wicked little Mamie, — 
why, I fall to pitying her as if she were some 
one else, and wish that some one would cry 
over her a little. I can't cry. 

Roy used to say a thing, — I have not the 



The Gates Ajar. 21 

words, but it was like this, — that one must be 
either very young or very ungenerous, if one 
could find time to pity one's self. 

I have lain for two nights, with my eyes 
open all night long. I thought that perhaps 
I might see him. I have been praying for a 
touch, a sign, only for something to break the 
silence into which he has gone. But there is 
no answer, none. The light burns blue, and 
I see at last that it is morning, and go down 
stairs alone, and so the day begins. 

Something of Mrs. Browning's has been 
keeping a dull mechanical time in my brain 
'ill day. 

" God keeps a niche 
In Heaven to hold our idols : . . . . albeit 
He brake them to our faces, and denied 
That our close kisses should impair their white." 

But why must He take them } And why 
should He keep them there? Shall we ever 
see them framed in their glorious gloom t 
Will He let us touch them then } Or must we 
stand like a poor worshipper at a Cathedral, 
looking up at his pictured saint afar off upon 
the other side } 

Has everything stopped just here.'' Our 
talks together in the twilight, our planning 
and hoping and dreaming together; our 



22 The Gates Ajar. 

walks and rides and laughing ; our reading 
and singing and loving, — these then are all 
gone out forever ? 

God forgive the words ! but Heaven will 
never be Heaven to mp without them. 

March 4. 

Perhaps I had better not write any more 
here after this. 

On looking over the leaves, I see that the 
little green book has become an outlet for the 
shallower part of pain. 

Meta Tripp and Deacon Quirk, gossip and 
sympathy that have buzzed into my trouble 
and annoyed me like wasps (we are apt to 
make more fuss over a wasp-sting than a sabre- 
cut), just that proportion of suffering which 
alone can ever be put into words, — the sur- 
face. 

I begin to understand what I never under- 
stood till now, — what people mean by the 
luxury of grief. No, I am sure that I never 
understood it, because my pride suffered as 
much as any part of me in that other time. 
I would no more have spent two consecutive 
hours drifting at the mercy of my thoughts, 
than I would have put my hand into the fur- 



The Gates Ajar, 23 

nace fire. The right to mourn makes every- 
thing different. Then, as to mother, I was very 
young when she died, and father, though I 
loved him, was never to me what Roy has 
been. 

This luxury of grief, like all luxuries, is 
pleasurable. Though, as I was saying, it is 
only the shallow part of one's heart — I im- 
agine that the deepest hearts have their shal- 
lows — which can be filled by it, still it brings 
a shallow relief 

Let it be, confessed to this honest book, that, 
driven to it by desperation, I found in it a 
wretched sort of content. 

Being a little stronger now physically, I 
shall try to be a little braver ; it will do no 
harm to try. So I seem to see that it was 
the content of poison, — salt-water poured 
between shipwrecked lips 

At any rate, I mean to put the book away 
and lock it up. Roy used to say that he did 
not believe in journals. I begin to see why. 



24 The Gates Ajar, 



III. 

March 7. 

I have taken out my book, and am going to 
write again. But there is an excellent reason. 
I have something else than myself to write 
about. 

This morning Phoebe persuaded me to walk 
down to the office, " To keep up my spirits and 
get some salt pork.'* 

She brought my things and put them on me 
while I was hesitating ; tied my victorine and 
buttoned my gloves ; warmed my boots, and 
fussed about me as if I had been a baby. It 
did me good to be taken care of, and I thanked 
her softly ; a little more softly than I am apt to 
speak to Phoebe. 

" Bless your soul, my dear ! " she said, wink- 
ing briskly, " I don't want no thanks. It 's 
thanks enough jest to see one of your old 
looks comin' over you for a spell, sence — " 

She knocked over a chair with her broom, 
and left her sentence unfinished. Phoebe has 



The Gates Ajar. 25 

always had a queer, clinging, superior sort of 
Jove for us both* She dandled us on her knees, 
and made all our rag-dolls, and carried us 
through measles and mumps and the rest. 
Then mother's early death threw all the care 
upon her. I believe that in her secret heart 
she considers me more her child than her mis- 
tress. It cost a great many battles to become 
established as " Miss Mary." 

" I should like to know," she would say, 
throwing back her great, square shoulders and 
towering up in front of me, — "I should like to 
know if you s'pose I 'm a goin' to ' Miss ' any- 
body that I Ve trotted to Bamberry Cross as 
many times as I have you, Mary Cabot ! 
Catch me ! " 

I remember how she would insist on calling 
me " her baby " after I was in long dresses, and 
that it mortified me cruelly once when Meta 
Tripp was here to tea with some Boston cou- 
sins. Poor, good Phoebe ! Her rough love 
seems worth more to me, now that it is all I 
have left me in the world. It occurs to me 
.that I may not have taken notice enough of 
her lately. She has done her honest best to 
comfort me, and she loved Roy, too. 

But about the letter. I wrapped my face i^p 
2 



26 The Gates Ajar, 

closely in the crepe ^ so that, if I met Deacon 
Quirk, he should not recognize*mc, and, think- 
ing that the air was pleasant as I walked, came 
home with the pork for Phoebe and a letter for 
myself. I did not open it ; in fact, I forgot all 
about it, till I had been at home for half an 
hour. I cannot bear to open a letter since that 
morning when the lances of light fell on the 
snow. They have written to me from every- 
where, — uncles and cousins and old school- 
friends ; well-meaning people ; saying each 
the same thing in the same way, — no, not 
that exactly, and very likely I should feel 
hurt and lonely if they did not write ; but 
sometimes I wish it did not all have to be 
read. 

So I did not notice much about my letter 
this morning, till presently it occurred to me 
that what must be done had better be done 
quickly ; so I drew up my chair to the desk, 
prepared to read and answer on the spot. 
Something about the writing and the signature 
rather pleased me : it was dated from Kansas, 
and was signed with the name of my mother's, 
youngest sister, Winifred Forceythe. I will 
lay the letter in between these two leaves, for 
it seems to suit the pleasant, spring-like day ; 



The Gates Ajar, 27 

besides, I took out the green book again on 
account of it. ' 



Lawrence, Kansas, February 21. 

My dear Child, — I have been thinking 
how happy you will be by and by because 
Roy is happy. 

And yet I know — I understand — 

You have been in all my thoughts, and they 
have been such pitiful, tender thoughts, that I 
cannot help letting you know that somebody is 
sorry for you. For the rest, the heart knoweth 
its own, and I am, after all, too much of a 
itranger to my sister's child to intermeddle. 

So my letter dies upon my pen. You can- 
not bear words yet. How should I dare 
to fret you with them ? I can only reach 
you by my silence, and leave you with 
the Heart that bled and broke for you and 
Roy. 

Your Aunt, 

Winifred Forceythe. 

Postscript, February 23. 

I open my letler to add, that I am thinking 
of coming to New England with Faith, — you 
know Faith and I have nobody but each other 



28 The Gates Ajar, 

now. Indeed, I may be on my way by the 
time this reaches you. It is just possible that 
I may not come back to the West. I shall be 
foi a time at your uncle Calvin's, and then my 
husband's friends think that they, must have 
me. I should like to see you for a day or two, 
but if you do not care to see me, say so. If 
you let me come because you think you must, 
I shall find it out from your face in an hour. 
I should like to be something to you, or do 
something for you ; but if I cannot, I would 
rather not come/ 

I like that letter. 

I have written to her to come, and in such 
a way that I think she will understand me to 
mean what I say. I have not seen her since I 
was a child. I know that she was very much 
younger than my mother ; that she spent her 
young ladyhood teaching at the South ; — grand- 
father had enough with which to support her, 
but I have heard it said that she preferred to 
take care of herself; — that she finally married 
a poor minister, whose sermons people liked, 
but whose coat was shockingly shabby ; that 
she left the comforts and elegances and friendn 
of New England to go to the West and bury 



The Gates Ajar. 29 

herself in an unheard-of little place with him 
(I think she must have loved him) ; that he 
afterwards settled in Lawrence ; that there, af- 
ter they had been married some childless years, 
this little Faith was born ; and that there Uncle 
Forceythe died about three years ago ; that is 
about all I know of her. I -suppose her share 
of Grandfather Burleigh's little property sup- 
ports her respectably. I understand that she 
has been living a sort of missionary life among 
her husband's people since his death, and that 
they think they shall never see her like again. 
It is they -rvho keep her from coming home 
again, Uncle Calvin's wife told me once ; they 
and one other thing, — her husband's grave. 

I hope she will come to see me. I notice 
one strange thing about her letter. She does 
not use the ugly words "death" and "dying." 
I don't know exactly what she put in their 
places, but something that had a pleasant 
sound. 

" To be happy because Roy is happy." I 
wonder if she really thinks it is possible. 

I v/onder what makes the words ' chase 
me about. 



30 The Gates Ajar, 



IV. 

May 5. 

I am afraid that my brave resolutions are 
all breaking down. 

The stillness of the May days is creeping 
into everything ; the days in which the fur- 
lough was to come ; in which the bitter Peace 
has come instead, and in which he would have 
been at home, never to go away from me any 
more. 

The lazy winds are choking me. Their faint 
sweetness makes me sick. The moist, rich loam 
is ploughed in the garden ; the grass, more 
golden than green, springs in the warm hollow 
by the ^ront gate ; the great maple, just reach- 
ing up to tap at the window, blazes and bows 
under its weight of scarlet blossoms. I cannot 
bear their perfume ; it comes up in great 
breaths, when the window is opened. I wish 
that little cricket, just waked from his winter's 
nap, would not sit there on the sill and chirp 
at me. I hate the bluebirds flashing in and 



TJie Gates Ajar. 31 

out of the carmine cloud that the maple makes, 
and singing, singing, everywhere. 

It is easy to understand how Bianca heard 
" The nightingales sing through her head," 
how she could call them " Owl-like birds," 
who sang "for spite," who sang "for hate," 
who sang "for doom." 

Most of all I hate the maple. I wish winter 
were back again to fold it away in white, with 
its bare, black fingers only to come tapping at 
the window. " Roy's maple " we used to call 
it. How much fun he had out of that old 
tree ! 

As far back as I can remember, we never 
considered spring to be officially introduced till 
we had had a fight with the red blossoms. 
Roy used to pelt me well ; but with that pretty 
chivalry of his, which was rare in such a little 
fellow, which developed afterwards into that 
rarer treatmeot of women, of which every one 
speaks who speaks of him, he would stop the 
play the instant it threatened roughness. I 
UFed to be glad, though, that I had strength 
and courage enough to make it some fun to 
him. 

The maple is full of pictures of Roy. Roy 
not yet over the dignity of his first boots, aim- 



32 The Gates Ajar, 

• 

ing for the cross-barred branch, coming to the 
ground with a terrible wrench on his ankle, 
straight up again before anybody could stop 
him, and sitting there on the ugly, swaying 
bough as white as a sheet, to wave his cap, — 
"There, I meant to do it, and I have ! " Roy, 
chopping off the twigs for kindling-wood in 
his mud oven, and sending his hatchet right 
through the parlor window. Roy cutting leaves 
for me, and then pulling all my wreaths down 
over my nose every time I put them on ! Roy 
making me jump half-way across the room 
with a sudden thump on my window, and, look- 
ing out, I would see him with his hat off and 
hair blown from his forehead, framed in by the 
scented blossoms, or the quivering green-, or 
the flame of blood-red leaves. But there is no 
end to them if I begin. 

I had planned, if he came this week, to strip 
the richest branches, and fill his room. 

May 6. 

The May-day stillness, the lazy winds, the 
sweetness in the air, are all gone. A miser- 
able northeasterly storm has set in. The gar 
den loam is a mass of mud ; the golden grass 
is drenched ; the poor little cricket is drowned 



The Gates Ajar. 33 

ill a mud-puddle ; the bluebirds are huddled 
among the leaves, with their heads under their 
drabbled wings, and the maple blossoms, dull 
and shrunken, drip against the glass. 

It begins to be evident that it will never do 
for me to live alone. Yet who is there, in the 
wide world that I could bear to bring here — 
into Roy's place .-* 

A little old-fashioned book, bound in green 
and gold, attracted my attention this morning 
while I was dusting the library. It proved to be 
my mother's copy df " Elia," — one that father 
had given her, I saw by the fly-leaf, in their 
early engagement days. It is some time since 
I have read Charles Lamb ; indeed, since the 
middle of February I have read nothing of 
any sort. Phoebe dries the Journal for me 
every night, and sometimes I glance at the 
Telegraphic Summary, and sometimes I don't. 

" You used to be fond enough of books," Mrs. 
Bland says, looking puzzled, — " regular blue- 
stocking, Mr. Bland called you (no personal 
objection to you, of course, my dear, but he 
does lit like literary women, which is a great 
comfort to me). Why don't you read and di- 
vert yourself now } " 

But my brain, like the rest of me, seems to 

2* c 



34 The Gates Ajar, 

be crushed. I could not follow three pages of 
history with attention. Shakespeare, Words- 
worth, Whittier, Mrs. Browning, are filled with 
Roy's marks, — and so down the shelf. Be- 
sides, poetry strikes as nothing else does, deep 
into the roots of things. One finds every- 
where some strain at the fibres of one's heart. 
A mind must be healthily reconciled to actual 
life, before a poet — at least most poets — can 
help it. We must learn to bear and to work, 
before we can spare strength to dream. 

To hymns and hymn-like poems, exception 
should be made. Some of them are like soft 
hands stealing into ours in the dark, and hold- 
ing us fast without a spoken word. I do not 
know how many times Whittier's " Psalm,'* 
and that old cry of Cowper's, " God moves in a 
mysterious way," have quieted me, — just the 
sound of the words ; when I was too wild to 
take in their meaning, and too wicked to be- 
lieve them if I had. 

As to novels, (by the way, Meta Tripp sent 
me over four yesterday afternoon, among which 
notice "Aurora Floyd" and "Uncle Silas,") 
the author of " Rutledge " expresses my feel- 
ing about them precisely. I do not remember 
her exact words, but they are not unlike these. 



The Gates Ajar, 35 

'•* She had far outlived the passion of ordinary 
novels ; and the few which struck the depths of 
her experience gave her more pain than pleas- 
ure." 

However, I took up poor "Elia" this morning, 
and stumbled upon " Dream Children/' to which, 
for pathos and symmetry, I have read few 
things superior in the language. Years ago, I 
almost knew it by heart, but it has slipped out 
of memory with many other things of late. 
Any book, if it be one of those which Lamb 
calls " books which are books," put before us 
at different periods of life, will unfold to us new 
meanings, — wheels within wheels, delicate 
springs of purpose to which, at the last read- 
ing, we were stone-blind ; gems which perhaps 
the author ignorantly cut and polished. 

A sentence in this "Dream Children," which 
at eighteen I passed by with a compassionate 
sort of wonder, only thinking that it gave me 
" the blues " to read it, and that I was glad 
Roy was alive, I have seized upon and learned 
all over again now. I write it down to the 
dull music of the rain. 

" And how, when he died, though he had 
not been dead an hour, it seemed as if he had 
died a great while ago, such a distance there 



36 The Gates Ajar, 

is betwixt life and death ; and how I bore 

his death, as I thought, pretty well at first, but 
afterwards it haunted and haunted me ; and 
though I did not cry or take it to heart as some 
do, and as I think he would have done if I had 
died, yet I missed him all day long, and knew 
not till then how much I had loved him. I 
missed his kindness and I missed his crossness, 
and wished him to be alive again to be quarrel- 
ling with him (for we quarrelled sometimes), 
rather than not have him again." 

How still the house is ! I can hear the 
coach rumbling away at the half-mile corner, 
coming up from the evening train. A little 
arrow of light has just cut the gray gloom of 
.^he West. 

Ten o'clock. 

The coach to which I sat listening rum- 
bled up to the gate and stopped. Puzzled for 
the moment, and feeling, as inhospitable as I 
knew how, I went down to the door. The 
driver was already on the steps, with a bundle 
in his arms that proved to be a rather minute 
child ; and a lady, veiled, was just stepping from 
the carriage into the rain. Of course I came 
to my senses at that, and, calHng to Phoebe that 
Mrs. P^orceythe had come, sent her out an um- 
brella. 



The Gates Ajar. 37 

She surprised me by running lightly up the 
steps.' I had imagined a somewhat advanced 
age and a sedate amount of infirmities, to 
be necessary concomitants of aunthood. She 
came in all sparkling with rain-drops, and, 
gently pushing aside the hand with which I 
v/as trying to pay her driver, said, laughing : — 

" Here we are, bag and baggage, you see, 
' big trunk, little trunk,' &c., &c. You did not 
expect me ? Ah, my letter missed then. It is 
too bad to take you by storm in this way. 
Come, Faith ! No, don't trouble about the 
trunks just now. Shall I go right in here } " 

Her voice had a sparkle in it, like the drops 
on her veil, but it was low and very sweet. I 
took her in by the dining-room fire, and was 
turning to take off the little girl's things, when 
a soft hand stayed me, and I saw that she had 
drawn off the wet veil. A face somewhat 
pale looked down at me, — she is taller than 
I, — with large, compassionate eyes. 

" I am too wet to kiss you, but I must have a 
look," she said, smiling. "That will do. You 
are like your mother, very like." 

I don't know what possessed me, whether it 
was the sudden, sweet feeling of kinship with 
something alive, or whether it was her face or 
her voice, or all together, but I said : — 



38 ' The Gates Ajar. 

"I 4on't think you are too wet to be 
kisse''! ,*' and threw my arms about her neck, — 
I am net of the kissing kind, either, and I had 
01) my new bombazine, and she was very wet. 

I thought she looked pleased. 

Phoebe was sent to open the register in the 
blue room, and as soon as it was warm I went 
up with them, leading Faith by the hand. I 
am unused to children, and she kept stepping 
on my dress, and spinning around and tipping 
over, in the most astonishing manner. It strik- 
ingly reminded me of a top at the last gasp. 
Her mother observed that she was tired and 
sleepy* Pho&be was waiting around awkward- 
ly up stairs, with fresh towels on her arm. 
Aunt Winifred turned and held out her hand. 

" Well, Phoebe, I am glad to see you. This 
is Phoebe, I am sure ? You have altered with 
everything else since I was here before. You 
keep bright and well, I hope, and take good 
care of Miss Mary } " 

It was a simple enough thing, to be sure, her 
taking the trouble to notice the old servant 
Virith whom she had scarcely ever exchanged a 
half-dozen words ; but I liked it. I liked the 
way, too, in which it was done. It reminded 
me of Roy's fine, well-bred manner towards his 



The Gates Ajar, 39 

inferiors, — always cordial, yet always appro- 
priate ; I have heard that our mother had 
much the same. 

I tried to make things look as pleasant as 
I could down stairs, while they were making 
ready for tea. The grate was raked up a little, 
a bright supper-cloth laid on the table, and the 
curtains drawn. Phoebe mixed a hasty cake 
of some sort, and brought out the heavier 
pieces of silver, — tea-pot, &c., which I do not 
use when I am alone, because it is so much 
trouble to take care of them, and because I 
like the httle Wedgwood set that Roy had 
for his chocolate. 

" How pleasant ! '* said Aunt Winifred, as she 
sat down with Faith in a high chair beside her. 
Phoebe had a great hunt up garret for that 
chair ; it has been stowed away there since it 
and I parted company. " How pleasant every- 
thing is here ! I believe in bright dining-rooms. 
There is an indescribable dinginess to most 
that I have seen, which tends to anything but 
thankfulness. Homesick, Faith } No ; that 's 
right. I don't think we shall be homesick at 
Cousin Mary's." 

If she had not said that, the probabilities 
are that they would have been, for I have fall- 



40 The Gates Ajar, 

en quite out of the way of active housekeep- 
ing, and have almost forgotten how to enter- 
tain a friend. But I do not want her good 
opinion wasted, and mean they shall have a 
good time if I can make it for them. 

It was a little hard at first to see her oppo- 
site me at th'e table ; it was Roy's place. 

While she was sitting there in the light, with 
the dust and weariness of travel brushed away 
a little, I was able to make up my mind what 
this aunt of mine looks like. 

She is young, then, to begin with, and I find 
it necessary to reiterate the fact, in order to 
get it into my stupid brain. The cape and 
spectacles, the little old woman's shawl and in- 
valid's walk, for which I had prepared myself, 
persist in hovering before my bewildered eyes, 
ready to drop down on her at a moment's 
notice. Just thirty-five she is by her own 
showing ; older than I, to be sure ; but as we 
passed in front of the mirror together, once to- 
night, T could not see half that difference be- 
tween us. The peace of her face and the pain 
of mine contrast sharply, and give me an old, 
worn look, beside her. After all, though, to 
one who had seen much of life, hers would be 
the true maturity perhaps, — the maturity of 



The Gates Ajar. 41 

repose. A look in her eyes once or twice gave 
me the impression that she thinks me rather 
young, though she is far too wise and dehcate 
to show it. I don't hke to be treated Hke a 
girl. I mean to find out what she does think. 
My eyes have been on her face the whole 
evening, and I believe it is the sweetest face 
— woman's face — that I have ever seen. Yet 
she is far from being a beautiful woman. It 
is difficult to say what makes the impression ; 
scarcely any feature is accurate, yet the toiit en- 
semble seems to have no fault. Her hair, which 
must have been bright bronze once, has grown 
gray — quite gray — before its time. I really 
do not know of what color her eyes are ; blue, 
perhaps, most frequently, but they change with 
every word that she speaks ; when quiet, they 
have a curious, far-away look, and a steady, 
lambent light shines through them. Her 
mouth is well cut and delicate, yet you do not 
so much notice that as its expression. It looks 
as if it held a happy secret, with which, how- 
ever near one may come to her, one can never 
intermeddle. Yet there are lines about it and 
on her forehead, which are proof plain enough 
that she has not always floated on summer 
Fca^. She yet wears her widow's black, but 



42 The Gates Ajar, 

relieves it pleasantly by white at the throat 
and wrists. Take her altogether, I like to 
look at her. 

Faith is a round, rolling, rollicking little 
piece of mischief, with three years and a half oi 
experience in this very happy world. She has 
black eyes and a pretty chin, funny little pink 
hands all covered with dimples, and a dimple 
in one cheek besides. She has tipped over 
two tumblers of water, scratched herself all 
over playing with the cat, and set her apron on 
fire already since she has been here. I stand 
in some awe of her ; but, after I have become 
initiated, I think that we shall be very good 
friends. 

" Of all names in the catalogue," I said to 
her mother, when she came down into the par- 
lor after putting her to bed, " Faith seems to 
be about the most inappropriate for this solid- 
bodied, twinkling little bairn of yours, with her 
pretty red cheeks, and such an appetite for 
supper ! " 

" Yes," she said, laughing, " there is nothing 
spiritiLclle about Faith. But she means just 
that to me. I could not call her anything 
else. Her father gave her the name." Her 
face changed, but did not sadden ; a quietness 



The Gates Ajar. 43 

crept into it and into her voice, but that was 
all. 

" I will tell you about it sometime, — per- 
haps," she added, rising and standing by the 
fire. *' Faith looks like him." Her eyes as- 
sumed their distant look, "like the eyes of 
those who see the dead," and gazed away, — 
so far away, into the fire, that I felt that she 
would not be listening to anything that I 
might say, and therefore said nothing. 

We spent the evening chatting cosily. After 
the fire had died down in the grate (I had 
Phoebe light a pine-knot there, because I no- 
ticed that Aunt Winifred fancied the blaze in 
the dining-room), we drew up our chairs into 
the corner by the register, and roasted away to 
our hearts' content. A very bad habit, to sit 
over the register, and Aunt Winifred says she 
shall undertake to break me of it. We talked 
about everything under the sun, — uncles, 
aunts, cousins, Kansas and Connecticut, the 
surrenders and the assassination, books, pic- 
tures, music, and Faith, — O, and Phoebe and 
Ihe cat. Aunt Winifred talks well, and does 
not gossip nor exhaust her resources ; one feels 
always that she has material in reserve on 
any subject that is worth talking about. 



44 ^/^^ Gates Ajar. 

For one thing I thank her with all my heart : 
she never spoke of Roy. 

Upon reflection, I find that I have really 
passed a pleasant evening. 

She knocked at my door just now, after I 
had written the last sentence, and had put 
away the book for the night. Thinking thaf 
it was Phoebe, I called, " Come in," and did not 
turn. She had come to the bureau where I 
stood unbraiding my hair, and touched my arm, 
before I saw who it was. She had on a crim- 
son dressing-gown of warm flannel, and her 
hair hung down on her shoulders. Although 
so gray, her hair is massive yet, and coils 
finely when she is dressed. 

"I beg your pardon," she said, "but I 
thought you would not be in bed, and I came 
in to say, — let me sit somewhere else at the 
breakfast-table, if you like. I saw that I had 
taken *the vacant place.' Good night, my 
dear." 

It was such a little thing ! I wonder how 
many people would have noticed it or taken 
the trouble to sp^ak of it. The quick percep- 
tion, the unusual delicacy, — these too are like 
Roy. 



The Gates Ajar. 45 

I almost wish that she had stayed a Httle 
longer. I almost think that I could bear to 
have her speak to me about him. 

Faith, in the next room, seems to have v/ak- 
ened from a frightened dream, and I can hear 
their voices through the wall. Her mother is 
soothing and singing to her in the broken 
words of some old lullaby with which Phoebe 
used to sing Roy and me to sleep, years and 
years ago. The unfamiliar, home-like sound 
is pleasant in the silent house. Phoebe, on her 
w^ay to bed, is stopping on the garret-stairs to 
listen to it. Even the cat comes mewing up 
to the door, and purring as I have not heard 
the creature purr since the old Sunday-night 
singing, hushed so long ago. 



4^ The Gates Ajar, 



V. 

May 7. 

I was awakened and nearly smothered this 
morning by a pillow thrown directly at my 
head. 

Somewhat unaccustomed, in the respectable, 
old maid's life that I lead, to such a pleasant 
little method of salutation, I jerked myself up- 
right, and stared. There stood Faith in her 
night-dress, laughing as if she would suffocate, 
and her mother in search of her was just 
knocking at the open door. 

" She insisted on going to wake Cousin Mary, 
and would n't be washed till I let her ; but I 
stipulated that she should kiss you softly on 
both your eyes." 

" I did," said Faith, stoutly ; " I kissed her 
eyes, both two of 'em, and her nose, and her 
mouth and her neck ; then I pulled her hair, 
and then I spinched her ; but I thought she 'd 
have to be banged a little. Was 7it it a bang, 
though ! " 



The Gates Ajar, 47 

It really did me gooct to begin the day with 
a hearty laugh. The days usually look so 
long and blank at the beginning, that I can 
hardly make up my mind to step out into 
them. Faith's pillow was the famous peb- 
ble in the pond, to which authors of origi- 
nal imagination invariably resort ; I felt its 
little circles widening out all through the 
day. I wonder if Aunt Winifred thought of 
that. She thinks of many things. 

For instance, afraid apparently that I should 
think I was afflicted with one of those profes- 
sional visitors who hold that a chance relation- 
ship justifies them in imposing on one from 
the beginning to the end of the chapter, she 
managed to make me understand, this morn- 
ing, that she was expecting to go back to 
Uncle Forceythe's brother on Saturday. I 
was surprised at myself to find that this 
proposition struck me with dismay. I insisted 
with all my heart on keeping her for a week 
at the least, and sent forth a fiat that her 
trunks should be unpacked. 

We have had a quiet, homelike day. Faith 
found her way to the orchard, and installed 
herself there for the day, overhauling tlie 
muddy grass with her bare hands to find 



48 The Gates Ajar, 

dandelions. She came in at dinner-time as 
brown as a little nut, with her hat hanging 
down her neck, her apron torn, and just about 
as dirty as I should suppose it possible for a 
clean child to succeed in making herself. Her 
mother, however, seemed to be quite used to 
it, and the expedition with which she made her 
presentable I regard as a stroke of genius. 

While Faith was disposed of, and the house 
still, auntie and I took our knitting and spent 
a regular old woman's morning at the south 
window in the dining-room. In the afternoon 
Mrs. Bland came over, babies and all, and 
sent up her card to Mrs. Forceythe. 

Supper-time came, and still there had not 
been a word of Roy. I began to wonder at, 
while I respected, this unusual silence. 

While her mother was putting Faith to bed, 
I went into my room alone, for a few mo- 
ments' quiet. An early dark had fallen, for it 
had clouded up just before sunset. The dull, 
gray sky and narrow horizon shut down and 
crowded in everything. A soldier from the 
village, who has just come home, was walking 
down the street with his wife and sister. The 
crickets were chirping in the meadows. The- 
faint breath of the maple came up. 



The Gates Ajar. 49 

I sat down by the window, and hid my 
face in both my hands. I must have sat 
there some time, foi I had quite forgotten 
that I had company to entertain, when the 
door softly opened and shut, and some one 
came and sat down on the couch beside me. 
I did not speak, for I could not, and, the first 
I knew, a gentle arm crept about me, and she 
had gathered me into her lap and laid my 
head on her shoulder, as she might have gath- 
ered Faith. 

" There," she said, in her low, lulling voice, 
" now tell Auntie all about it." 

I don't know what it was, whether the voice, 
or touch, or words, but it came so suddenly, — 
and nobody had held me for so long, — that 
everything seemed to break up and unlock in 
a minute, and I threw up my hands and cried. 
I don't know how long I cried. 

She passed her hand softly to and fro across 
my hair, brushing it away from my temples, 
while they throbbed and burned ; but she did 
not speak. By and by I sobbed out : — 

"Auntie, Auntie, Auntie ! " as Faith sobs out 
in the dark. It seemed to me that I must 
have help or die. 

"Yes, dear. I understand. I know how 

8 D 



50 The Gates Ajar. 

hard it is. And you have been bearing it 
alone so long ! I am going to help you, and 
you must tell me all you can." 

The strong, decided words, " I am going to 
help you," gave me the first faint hope I have 
had, that I could be helped, and I could tell 
her — it was not sacrilege — the pent-up sto- 
ry of these weeks. All the time her hand 
went softly to and fro across my hair. 

Presently, when I was weak and faint with 
the new comfort of my tears, "Aunt Wini- 
fred," I said, " I don't know what it means to 
be resigned ; I don't know what it means ! " 

Still her hand passed softly to and fro 
across my hair. 

" To have everything stop all at once ! with- 
out giving me any time to learn to bear it. 
Why, you do not know, — it is just as if a 
great black gate had swung to and barred 
out the future, and barred out him, and left 
mc all alone in any world that I can ever live 
in, iorever and forever." 

" My child," she said, with emphasis solemn 
and low upon the words, — "my child. I do 
know. I think you forget — my husband." 

I had forgotten. How could I } We are 
most selfishly blinded by our own griefs. No 



The Gates Ajar. 51 

other form than ours ever seems to walk with 
us in the furnace. Her few words made me 
feel, as I could not have felt if she had said 
more, that this woman who was going to 
help me had suffered too ; had suffered per- 
haps more than I, — that, if I sat as a little 
child at her feet, she could teach me through 
the kinship of her pain. 

" O my dear," she said, and held me close, 
" I have trodden every step of it before you, 

— every single step." 

" But you never were so wicked about it ! 
You never felt — why, I have been afraid I 
should hate God ! You never were so wicked 
as that." 

Low under her breath she answered " Yes," 

— this sweet, saintly woman who had come to 
me in the dark as an angel might. 

Then, turning suddenly, her voice trembled 
and broke : — 

*' Mary, Mary, do you think He could have 
lived those thirty-three years, and be cruel to 
you now } Thiuk that over and over ; only 
that. It may be the only thought you dare 
to have, — it was all I dared to have once, — 
but cling to it ; cling with both hands^ Mary, 
and keep it." 



52 The Gates Ajar^ 

I only put both hands about her neck and 
clung there ; but I hope — it seems, as if I 
clung a little to the thought besides ; it was 
as new- and sweet to me as if I had never 
heard of it in all my life ; and it has not left 
me yet. 

" And then, my dear," she said, when she 
had let me cry a little longer, "when you 
have once found out that Roy's God loves 
you more than Roy does, the rest comes 
more easily. It will not be as long to wait 
as it seems now. It is n't as if you never 
were going to see him again." 

I looked up bewildered. 

" What 's the matter, dear } 

"Why, do you think I shall see him,— 
really see him ? " 

" Mary Cabot," she said abruptly, turnii^g 
tc look at me, " who has been talking to you 
about this thing ? " 

" Deacon Quirk," I answered faintly, — 
"Deacon Quirk and Dr. Bland." 

She put her other arm around me with a 
quick movement, as if she would shield me 
from Deacon Quirk and Dr. Bland. 

" Do I think you will see him again } You 
might as well ask me if I thought God made* 



The Gates Ajar, 53 

you and made Roy, and gave you to each 
other. See him ! Why, of course you will 
see hira as you saw him here." 

" As I saw him here ! Why, here I looked 
into his eyes, I saw him smile, I touched hira 
Why, Aunt Winifred, Roy is an angel ! " 

She patted my hand with a little, soft, com- 
forting laugh. 

" But he is not any the less Roy for that, — 
not any the less your own real Roy, who will 
love you and wait for you and be very glad to 
see you, as he used to love and wait and be 
glad when you came home from a journey on 
a cold winter night." 

" And he met me at the door, and led me in 
where it was light and warm ! " I sobbed. 

" So he will meet you at the door in this 
other home, and lead you into the light and 
the warmth. And cannot that make the cold 
and dark a little shorter .'* Think a minute ! '' 

" But there is God, — I thought we went to 
Heaven to worship Him, and — " 

" Shall you worship more heartily or less, 
for having Roy again t Did Mary love the 
Master more or less, after Lazarus came back ? 
Why, my child, where did you get your ideas 
of God ? Don't you suppose He knows how 
you love Roy ?" 



54 The Gates Ajar, 

I drank in the blessed words without doubt 
or argument. I was too thirsty to doubt 
or argue. Some other time I may ask her 
how she knows this beautiful thing, but not 
now. All I can do now is to take it into 
my heart and hold it there. 

Roy my own again, — not only to look at 
standing up among the singers, — but close to 
me ; somehow or other to be as near as — to 
be nearer than — he was here, really mice 
again ! I shall never let this go. 

After we had talked awhile, and when it 
came time to say good night, I told her a little 
about my conversation with Deacon Quirk, 
and what I said to him about the Lord's v/ill. 
I did not know but that she wOuld blame me. 

'* Some time," she said, turning her great, 
compassionate eyes on me, — I could feel 
them in the dark, — and smiling, " you will 
find out all at once, in a happy moment, that 
you can say those words with all your hearty 
and with all your soul, and with all your 
strength ; it will come, even in this world, if 
you will only let it. But, until it does, you do 
right, quite right, not to scorch your altar with 
a false burnt-offering. God is not a God to be 
mocked. He would rather have only the old 



The Gates Ajar, 55 

cry : * I believe ; help mine unbelief/ and wait 
till you can say the rest. 

" It has often grated on my ears," she added, 
" to hear people speak those words unworthily. 
They seem to me the most solemn words that 
the Bible contains, or that Christian experience 
can utter. As far as my observation goes, the 
good people — for they are good people — 
who use them when they ought to know bet- 
ter are of two sorts. They are people in act- 
ual agony, bewildered, racked with rebellious 
doubts, unaccustomed to own even to them- 
selves the secret seethings of sin ; really per- 
suaded that because it is a Christian duty to 
have no will but the Lord's, they are under 
obligations to affirm that they have no will 
but the Lord's. Or else they are people who 
know no more about this pain of bereavement 
than a child. An affliction has passed over 
them, put them into mourning, made them 
feel uncomfortable till the funeral was over, 
or even caused them a shallow sort of grief, 
of which each week evaporates a little, till it is 
gone. These mourners air their trouble the 
longest, prate loudest about resignation, and 
have the most to say^ to you or me about our 
rebellious state of mind.' Poor things ! One 



56 The Gates Ajar, 

•can hardly be vexed at them for pity. Think 
of being made so ! " 

" There is still another class of the cheer- 
fully resigned," I suggested, " who are even 
more ready than these to tell you of your des- 
perate wickedness — " 

" People who have never had even the 
semblance of a trouble in all their lives," she 
interrupted. " Yes. I was going to speak of 
them. Of all miserable comforters, they are 
the most arrogant." 

"As to real instant submission," she said 
presently, " there is some of it in the world. 
There are sweet, rare lives capable of great 
loves and great pains, which yet are kept 
so attuned to the life of Christ, that the cry 
in the Garden comes scarcely less honestly 
from their lips, than from his. Such, like 
the St. John, are but one among the Twelve. 
Such, it will do you and me good, dear, at least 
to remember." 

"Such," I thought when I was left alone, 
"you new dear friend of mine, who have 
come with such a blessed coming into my 
lonely days, — such you must be now, what- 
ever you were once." 

If I should tell her that, how she would 
open her soft eyes ! 



The Gates Ajar, 57 



VL 

May 9. 

As I was looking over the green book last 
night, Aunt Winifred came up behind me and 
softly laid a bunch of violets down between 
the leaves. > 

By an odd contrast, the contented, passion- 
less things fell against those two verses that 
were copied from the German, and completely 
covered them from sight. I lifted the flow • 
ers, and held up the page for her to see. 

As she read, her face altered strangely ; ho-^ 
eyes dilated, her lip quivered, a flush shot ovet 
her checks and dyed her forehead up to the 
waves of her hair. I turned away quickly, 
feeling that I had committed a rudeness iu 
watching her, and detecting in her, how- 
ever involuntarily, some far, inner sympath)', 
or shadow of a long-past syr^pathy, with th^. 
desperate words. 

" Mary," she said, laying down the book, " I 
believe Satan wrote that." 
3* 



58 The Gates AjaK 

She laughed a little then, nervously, and 
paled back into her quiet, peaceful self. 

" I mean that he inspired it. They are 
wicked words. You must not read them 
over. You will outgrow them sometime with 
a beautiful growth of trust and love. Let 
them alone till that time comes. See, I will 
blot them out of sight for you with colors 
as blue as heaven, — the real heaven, where 
God will be loved the most." 

She shook apart the thick, sweet nosegay, 
and, taking a half-dozen of the little blossoms, 
pinned them, dripping with fragrant dew, upon 
the lines. There I shall let them stay, and, 
since she wishes it, I shall not lift them to 
see the reckless words till I can do it safely. 

This afternoon Aunt Winifred has been 
telling me about herself. Somewhat more, 
or of a different kind, I should imagine, from 
what she has told most people. She seems to 
love me a little, not in a proper kind of way, 
because I happen to be her niece, but for my 
own sake. It surprises me to find how 
pleased I am that she should. 

That Kansas life must have been very hard 
to her, in contrast as i^" was with the smooth 
elegance of her girlhood ; she was very young, 



The Gates Ajar. 59 

loo, when she undertook it. I said something 
of the sort to her. 

" They have been the hardest and the eas- 
iest, the saddest and the happiest, years of all 
my Hfe," she answered. 

I pondered the words in my heart, while I lis- 
tened to her story. She gave me vivid pictures 
of the long, bright bridal journey, overshad- 
owed with a very mundane weariness of jolting 
coaches and railway accidents before its close ; 
of the little neglected hamlet which waited 
for them, twenty miles from a post-office and 
thirty from a school-house ; of the parsonage, 
a log-hut among log-huts, distinguished and- 
adorned by a little lath and plastering, glass 
windows, and a doorstep ; — they drew in sight 
of it at the close of a tired day, with a red 
sunset lying low on the flats. 

Uncle Forceythe wanted mission-work, and 
mission-work he found here with — I should 
say with a vengeance, if the expression were 
exactly suited to an elegantly constructed and 
reflective journal. 

"My heart sank for a moment, I confess," 
she said, " but it never would do, you know, to 
let him suspect that, so I smiled away as well 
as I knew how, shook hands with one or two 



6o The Gates Ajar, 

women in r^d calico who had been "slickin 
up inside," they said ; went in by the fire, — it 
was really a pleasant fire, — and, as soon as 
they had left us alone, I climbed into John's 
lap, and, with both arms around his neck, told 
him that I knew we should be very happ}'. 
And I said — " 

" Said what ? " 

She blushed a little, like a girl. 

** I believe I said I should be happy in 
Patagonia, — with him. I made him 'laugh at 
last, and say that my face and words were 
like a beautiful prophecy. And, Mary, if they 
were, it was beautifully fulfilled. In the 
roughest times, — times of ragged clothes and 
empty flour-barrels, of weakness and sickness 
and quack doctors, of cold and discourage- 
ment, of prairie fires and guerillas, — from trou- 
ble to trouble, from year's end to year's end, 
we were happy together, we two. As long as 
we could have each other, and as long as we 
could be about our Master's business, we felt 
as if we did not dare to ask for anything 
more, lest it should seem that we were un- 
grateful for such wealth of mercy." 

It would take too long to write out here the 
half that she told me, though I wish I could, 



The Gates Ajar, 6i 

for it interested me more than any story that 
I have ever read. 

After years of Christ-like toiling to help those 
rough old farmers and wicked bushwhackers 
to Heaven, the call to Lawrence came, and it 
seemed to Uncle Forceythe that he had better 
go. It was a pleasant, influential parish, and 
there, though not less hard at work, they found 
fewei rubs and more comforts ; there Faith 
camf*, and there were their pleasant days, till 
the war. — I held my breath to hear her tell 
about Quantrell's raid. There, too, Uncle 
wasted through that death-in-life, consump- 
tion ; there he " fell on sleep," she said, and 
there she buried him. 

She gave me no further description of his 
death than those words, and she spoke them 
with her far-away, tearless eyes looking off 
through the window, and after she had 
spoken she was still for a time. 

The heart knoweth its own bitterness ; that 
grew distinct to me, as I sat, shut out by her 
silence. Yet there was nothing bitter about 
her face. 

" Faith was six months old when he went," 
she said presently. " We had never named 
her : Baby was name enough at first for such 



62 The Gates Ajar, ' 

a wee thing ; then she was the only one, and 
had come so late, that it seemed to mean more 
to us than to most to have a baby all to our- 
selves, and we Hked the sound of the word. 
When it became quite certain that John must 
go, we used to talk it over, and he said that he 
would like to name her, but what, he did not 
tell me; 

" At last, one night, after he had lain for a 
while thinking with closed eyes, he bade me 
bring the child to him. The sun was setting, 
I remember, and the moon was rising. He 
had had a hard day ; the life was all scorched 
out of the air. I moved the bed up by the 
window, that he might have the breath of the 
rising wind. Baby was wide awake, cooing 
softly to herself in the cradle, her bits of damp 
curls clinging to her head, and her pink feet 
in her hands. I took her up and brought her 
just as she was, and knelt down by the bed. 
The street was still. We could hear the frogs 
chanting a mile away. He lifted her little 
hands upon his own, and said — no matter 
about the words — but he told me that as he 
left the child, so he left the name, in my sacred 
charge, — that he had chosen it for me, — that, 
when he was out of sight, it might help me to 
have it often on my lips. 



The Gates Ajar. 63 

'*So there in the sunset and the moonrise, 
ve two alone together, he baptized her, and 
we gave our Httle girl to God." 

When she had said this, she rose and went 
over to the window, and stood with her face 
from me. By and by, " It was the fourteenth," 
she said, as if musing to herself, — " the four- 
teenth of June." 

I remember now that Uncle Forceythe died 
on the fourteenth of June. It may have been 
that the words of that baptismal blessing 
were the last that they heard, either child or 
mother. 

May 10. 

It has been a pleasant day ; the air shines 
like transparent gold ; the wind sweeps like 
somebody's strong arms over the flowers, and 
gathers up a crowd of perfumes that wander 
up and down about one. The church bells 
have rung out like silver all day. Those 
bells — especially the Second Advent at the 
further end of the village — are positively 
ghastly when it rains. 

Aunt Winifred was dressed bright and early 
for church. I, in morning dress and slippers, 
sighed and demurred. 

"Auntie, do you expect to hear anything 
new?" 



64 The Gates Ajar, 

"Judging from your diagnosis of Dr. Bland, 



— no. 



" To be edified, refreshed, strengthened, or 
instructed ? " 

" Perhaps not." 

" Bored, then 1 " 

"Not exactly." 

" What do you expect ? " 

" There are the prayers and singing. Gen- 
erally one can, if one tries, wring a little devo- 
tion from the worst of them. As to a minis- 
ter, if he is good and commonplace, young 
and earnest and ignorant, and I, whom he 
cannot help one step on the way to Heaven, 
consequently stay at home. Deacon Quirk, 
whom he might carry a mile or two, by and 
by stays at home also. If there is to be a 
'building fitly joined together,' each stone 
must do its part of the upholding. I feel 
better to go half a day always. I never com- 
pel Faith to. go, but I never have a chance, for 
she teases not to be left at home." 

" I think it 's splendid to go to church most 
the time," put in Faith, who was squatted on 
the carpet, counting sugared caraway seeds, 
— "all but the sermon. That is n't splendid. 
I don't like the gre-at big prayers 'n' things. 



The Gates Ajar. t 

I like caramary seeds, though ; mother alwa) .'. 
gives 'em to me in meeting 'cause I 'm a good 
girl. Don't you wish yoii were a good girl, 
Cousin Mary, so 's you could have some ? Be- 
sides, I Ve got on my best hat and my button- 
boots. Besides, there used to be a real funny 
little boy up in meeting at home, and he gave 
me a little tin dorg once over the top the pew. 
Only mother made me give it back. O, you 
ought to seen the man that preached down at 
Uncle Calvin's ! I tell you he was a bully old 
minister, — he banged tJie Bible like evejy- 
thing!" 

" There 's a devotional spirit for you ! " I said 
to her mother. 

" Well," she answered, laughing, " it is bet- 
ter than that she should be left to, play 
dolls and eat preserves, and be punished 
for disobedience. Sunday would invariably 
become a guilty sort of holiday at- that rate. 
Now, caraways or * bully old ministers ' not- 
withstanding, she carries to bed with her a 
dim notion that this has been holy time and 
pleasant time. Besides, the associations of a 
church-going childhood, if I can manage them 
genially, will be a help to her when she is 
older. Come, Faith ! go and pull off Cousin. 



66 The Gates Ajar, 

Mary's slippers, and bring down her boots, 
and then she '11 have to go to church. No, I 
did lit say that you might tickle her feet!" 

Feeling the least bit sorry that I had 
set the example of a stay-at-home Christian 
before the child, I went directly up stairs 
to make ready, and we started after all Id 
good season. 

Dr. Bland was in the pulpit. I observed 
that he looked — as indeed did the congre- 
gation bodily — with some curiosity into our 
slip, where it has been a rare occurrence of 
late to find me, and where the light, falling 
through the little stained glass oriel, touched 
Aunt Winifred's thoughtful smile. I won- 
dered whether Dr. Bland thought it was wicked 
for people to smile in church. No, of course 
he has too much sense. I wonder what it is 
about Dr. Bland that always suggests such 
questions. 

It has been very warm all day, — that aggra- 
v^iting, unseasonable heat, which is apt to come 
in spasms in the early part of May, and which, 
in thick spring alpaca and heavy sack, one 
finds intolerable. The thermometer stood at 
75° on the church porch ; every window was 
shut, and everybody's fan was fluttering 



The Gates Ajar, 6j 

Now, with this sight before him, what should 
our observant minister do, but give out as 
his first hymn : " Thine eartlily Sabbaths." 
"Thine earthly Sabbaths" would be a beauti- 
ful hymn, if it were not for those lines about 
the weather: — 

" No midnight shade, no clouded sun^ 
• Bui sacred, highy eternal noon " I 

There was a great hot sunbeam striking di- 
rectly on my black bonnet. My fan was bro- 
ken. I gasped for air. The choir went over 
and over and over the words, spinning them 
into one of those indescribable tunes, in which 
everybody seems to be trying to get through 
first. I don't know what they called them, — 
they always remind me of a game of " Tag." 

I looked at Aunt Winifred. She took it 
more coolly than I, but an amused little 
smile played over her face. She told me after 
church that she had repeatedly heard that 
hymn given out at noon of an intense July 
day. Her husband, she said, used to save 
it for the winter, or for cloudy afternoons. 
" Using means of grace," he called that. 

However, Dr. Bland did better the second 
time, Aunt Winifred joined in the singing, 



68 The Gates Ajar, 

and I enjoyed it, so I will not blame the poor 
man. I suppose he was so far lifted above 
this earth, that he would not have known 
whether he was preaching in Greenland's icy 
mountains, or on India's coral strand. 

When he announced his text, " For our con- 
versation is in Heaven," Aunt Winifred and I 
exchanged glances of content. We had been 
talking about heaven on the way to church ; 
at least, till Faith, not finding herself enter- 
tained, interrupted us by some severe specula- 
tions as to whether Maltese kitties were mulat- 
toes, and "why the bell-ringer did n't jump off 
the steeple some night, and see if he could n't 
fly right up, the way Elijah did." 

I listened to Dr. Bland as I have not listened 
for a long time. The subject was of all sub- 
jects nearest my heart. He is a scholarly 
man, in his way. He ought to know, I 
thought, more about it than Aunt Winifred. 
Perhaps he could help me. 

His sermon, as nearly as I can recall it, was 
substantially this. 

" The future life presented a vast theme to 
our speculation. Theories * too numerous to 
mention,' had been held concerning it. Pa- 
gans had believed in a coming state of rewards 



The Gates Ajar. 69 

and punishments. What natural theology 
had dimly foreshadowed, Revelation had 
brought in, like a full-orbed day, with healing 
on its wings." I am not positive about the 
metaphors. 

" As it was fitting that we should at times 
turn our thoughts upon the threatenings of 
Scripture, it was eminently suitable also that 
we should consider its promises. 

" He proposed in this discourse to consider 
the promise of heaven, the reward offered by 
Christ to his good and faithful servants. 

" In the first place : What is heaven } " 

I am not quite clear in my mind what it 
was, though I tried my best to find out. As 
nearly as I can recollect, however, — 

" Heaven is an eternal state. 

" Heaven is a state of holiness. 

" Heaven is a state of happiness." 

Having heard these observations before, I 
ivill not enlarge as he did upon them, but 
leave that for the " vivid imagination " of the 
green book. 

*' In the second place : What will be the 
employments of heaven ? 

" We shall study the character of God. 

"An infinite jnind must of necessity be eter- 



yo The Gates Ajar. 

nally an object of study to a finite mind. 
The finite mind must of necessity find in such 
study supreme delight. All lesser joys and 
interests will pale. He felt at moments, in 
reflecting on this . theme, that that good 
brother who, on being asked if he expected to 
see the dead wife of his youth in heaven, re- 
plied, * I expect to be so overwhelmed by the 
glory of the presence of God, that it may be 
thousands of years before I shall think of my 
wife,' — he felt that perhaps this brother was 
near the truth." 

Poor Mrs. Bland looked exceedingly uncora 
fortable. 

" We shall also glorify God." 

He enlarged upon this division, but I have 
forgotten exactly how. There was something 
about adoration, and the harpers harping with 
their harps, and the sea of glass, and crying. 
Worthy the Lamb ! and a great deal more that 
bewildered and disheartened me so that I 
could scarcely listen to it. I do not doubt 
that we shall glorify God primarily and happi- 
ly, but can we not do it in some other way 
than by harping and praying .^ 

" We shall moreover love each other with a 
universal and unselfish love." 



The Gates Ajar. 71 

" That we shall recognize our friends in 
neaven, he was inclined to think, after mature 
deliberation, was probable. But there would 
be no special selfish affections there. In this 
world we have enmities and favoritisms. In 
the world of bliss our hearts would glow with 
holy love alike to all other holy hearts." 

I wonder if he really thought that would 
make "a world of bliss," Aunt Winifred 
slipped her hand into mine under her cloak. 
Ah, Dr. Bland, if you had known how that 
little soft touch was preaching against you ! 

"In the words of an eminent divine, wh'.i 
has long since entered into the joys of which 
he spoke : * Thus, whenever the mind roves 
through the immense region of heaven, it will 
find, among all its innumerable millions, not 
an enemy, not a stranger, not an indifferent 
heart, not a reserved bosom. Disguise here, 
and even concealment, will be unknown. 
The soul will have no interests to conceal, no 
thoughts to disguise. A window will be 
opened in every breast, and show to every eye 
the rich and beautiful furniture within ! ' 
" Thirdly : How shall we fit for heaven ? " 
He mentioned several ways, among which, — 
" We should subiue our earthly affections to 
God. 



72 The Gates Ajar. 

" We must not love the creature as the Cre- 
ator. My son, give me thy heart. When he 
removes our friends from the scenes of time 
(with a glance in my direction), we should 
resign ourselves to his will, remembering that 
the Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away 
in mercy ; that He is all in all ; that He will 
never leave us nor forsake us ; that He can 
never change or die." 

As if that made any difference with the 
fact, that his best treasures change or die ! 

" In conclusion, — 

"We infer from our text that our hearts 
should not be set upon earthly happiness. 
(Enlarged.) 

"That the subject of heaven should be often 
in our thoughts and on our lips." (Enlarged.) 

Of course I have not done justice to the 
filling up of the sermon ; to the illustrations, 
metaphors, proof-texts, learning, and eloquence, 
— for, though Dr. Bland cannot seem to think 
outside of the old grooves, a little eloquence 
really flashes through the tameness of his 
style sometimes, and when he was talking 
about the harpers, etc., some of his words were 
well chosen. " To be. drowned in light," I 
have somewhere read, "may be very beauti- 



The Gates Ajar, 73 

ful ; it is still to be drowned." But I have 
given the skeleton of the discourse, and I have 
given the sum of the impressions that it left 
en mc, an attentive hearer. It is fortunate 
Jiat I did not hear it while I was alone ; it 
would have made me desperate. Going hun- 
gry, hopeless, bhnded, I came back empty, 
uncomforted, groping. I wanted something 
actual, something pleasant, about this place 
into which Roy has gone. He gave me glit- 
tering generalities, cold commonplace, vague- 
ness, unreality, a God and a future at which I 
sat and shivered. 

Dr. Bland is a good man. He had, I know, 
written that sermon with prayer. I only wish 
that he could be made to see how it glides 
over and sails splendidly away from wants 
like mine. 

]3ut thanks be to God who has provided a 
voice to answer me out of the deeps. 

Auntie and J walked home without any 
remarks (we overheard Deacon Quirk observe 
to a neighbor : " That 's what I call a good 
gospel* sermon, now!"), sent Faith away to 
Phoebe, sat down in the parlor, and looked at 
each other. 

" Well } " said I. 

4 



74 T^he Gates Ajar, 

" r know it," said she. 

Upon which we both began to laugh. 

" But did he say the dreadful truth ? " 

" Not as I find it in my Bible.'* 

" That it is probable, only probable that we 
shall recognize — " 

" My child, do not be troubled about that. 
It is not probable, it is sure. If I could find 
no proof for it, I should none the less believe 
it, as long as I believe in God. He gave you 
Roy, and the capacity to love him. He has 
taught you to sanctify that love through love 
to Him. Would it be like Him to create such 
beautiful and unselfish loves, — most like the 
love of heaven of any type we know, — just 
for our threescore years and ten of earth } 
Would it be like Him to suffer two souls to 
grow together here, so that the separation uf a 
day is pain, and then wrench them apart for 
all eternity t It would be what Madame de 
Gasparin calls, * fearful irony on the part of 
God.'" 

"But there are lost loves. There are lost 
souls." 

" How often would I have gathered you, 
and ye would not ! That is not his work. 
He would have saved both soul and love. 



The Gates Ajar. 75 

They had their own way. We were speaking 
of His redeemed. The object of having this 
world at all, you know, is to fit us for another. 
Of what use will it have been, if on passing out 
of it we must throw by forever its gifts, its les- 
sons, its memories ? God links things togeth- 
er better than that. Be sure, as you are sure 
of Him, that we shall be otu'selves in heaven. 
Would you be yourself not to recognize Roy } 
— consequently, not to love Roy, for to love 
and to be separated is misery, and heaven is 
joy. 

" I understand. But you said you had other 
proof." 

'* So I have ; plenty of it. If ' many shall 
come from the East and from the West, and 
shall sit down in the kingdom of God with 
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,' will they not be 
likely to know that they are with Abraham, 
Isaac, and Jacob } or will they think it is Sha- 
drach, Meshech, and Abednego } 

" What is meant by such expressions as 
* risen together,' ' sitting together at the right 
hand of God,' 'sitting together in heavenly 
places ' ? If they mean anything, they mean 
recognitions, friendships, enjoyments. 

"Did not Peter and the others know Moses 



'j6 The Gates Ajar, 

when they saw him ? — know Elias when they 
saw him ? Yet these oen were dead hundreds 
of years before the favored fishermen were 
born. 

" How was it with those * saints which slept 
and arose ' when Christ hung dead there in the 
dark ? Were they not seen of many ? " 

"But that was a miracle." 

"They were risen dead, such as you and 
I shall be some day. The miracle consisted 
in their rising then and there. Moreover, did 
not the beggar recognize Abraham } and — 
Well, one might go through the Bible finding 
it full of this promise in hints or assertions, in 
parables or visions. We are ' heirs of God/ 
* joint heirs with Christ' ; having suffered \^ith 
Him, we shall be 'glorified together^ Christ 
himself has said many sure things : * I will 
come and receive you, that where I am, there 
ye may be.' * I will that they be with me 
where I am.' Using, too, the very tyj^e of 
Godhead -to signify the eternal nearness and 
eternal love of just such as you and Roy as 
John and me, he j^rays : * Holy Father, keep 
them whom Thou hast given me, that tJiey 
may be one as we are.* 

" There is one place, though, where I find 



The Gates Ajar. 77 

wliat I like better than all the rest ; you re- 
member that old cry wrung from the lips of 
the stricken king, — * I shall go to him ; but 
he will not return to me.' " 

" I never thought before how simple and 
direct it is ; and that, too, in those old blinded 
daj's." 

" The more I study the Bible," she said, 
" and I study not entirely in ignorance of the 
commentators and the mysteries, the more 
perplexed I am to imagine where the current 
ideas of our future come from. They certainly 
are not in this book of gracious promises. That 
heaven which we heard about to-day was Dr. 
Bland's, not God's. ' It 's aye a wonderfu* 
thing to me,' as poor Lauderdale said, * the 
way some preachers take it upon themselves 
to explain matters to the Almighty ! ' " 

" But the harps and choirs, the throne, the 
white robes, are all in Revelation. Deacon 
Quirk would put his great brown finger on the 
verses, and hold you there triumphantly." 

" Can't people tell picture from substance, 
a metaphor from its meaning } That book of 
_ Revelation is precisely what it professes to be, 
— a vision ; a symbol. A symbol of some- 
thing, tc be sure; and rich with pleasant hopes, 



78 The Gates Ajar, 

but still a symbol. Now, T really believe that 
a large proportion of Christian church-mem- 
bers, who have studied their Bible, attended 
Sabbath schools, listened to sermons all their 
lives, if you could fairly come at their most 
definite idea of the place where they expect to 
spend eternity, would own it to be the golden 
city, with pearl gates, and jewels in the wall.. 
It never occurs to them, that, if one picture is 
literal, another must be. If we are to walk 
golden streets, how can we stand on a sea of 
glass .'' How can we * sit on thrones ' .? How 
can imtold millions of us 'lie in Abraham's 
bosom'? 

" But why have given us empty symbols ? 
Why not a little fact.?" 

" They are not empty .symbols. And why 
God did not give us accual descriptions of 
actual heavenly life, I don't trouble myself to 
wonder. He certainly had his reasons, and 
that is enough for me. I find from these sym- 
bols, and from his voice in my own heart, 
many beautiful things, — I will tell you some 
more of them at another time, — and, for the 
rest, I am content to wait. He loves me, and 
he loves mine. As long as we love Him, He 
will never separate Himself from us, or us froiD 
each other. That, at least, is surer 



The Gates Ajar, 79 

•If that is sure, the rest is of less impor- 
tance ; — yes. But Dr. Bland said an awful 
thing ! " 

** The quotation from a dead divine } " 

"Yes, That there will be no separate in- 
terests, no thoughts to conceal." 

" Poor good man ! He has found out by 
this time that he should not have laid down 
nonsense like that, without qualification or 
demur, before a Bible-reading hearer. It was 
simply /lis opinion, not David's, or Paul's, or 
John's, or Isaiah's. He had a perfect right 
to put it in the form of a conjecture. Nobody 
would forbid his conjecturing that the inhab- 
itants of heaven are all deaf and dumb, or 
wear green glasses, or shave their heads, if he 
chose, provided he stated that it was conjec- 
ture, not revelation." 

" But where does the Bible say that we shall 
have power to conceal our thoughts ? — and 
I would rather be annihilated than to spend 
eternity with heart laid bare, — the inner tem- 
ple thrown open to be trampled on by every 
passing stranger ! " 

"The Bible specifies very little about the 
minor arrangements of eternity in any way. 
But I doubt if; under any circumstances, it 



8o The Gates Ajar. 

would have occurred to inspired men to in- 
form us that our thoughts shall continue to be 
our own. The fact is patent on the face of 
things. The dead minister's supposition would 
destroy individuality at one fell sweep. We 
should be like a man walking down a room 
lined with mirrors, who sees himself reflected 
in all sizes, colors, shades, at all angles and in 
all proportions, according to the capacity of 
the mirror, till he seems no longer to belong 
to himself, but to be cut up into ellipses and 
octagons and prisms. How soon w^ould he 
grow frantic in such companionship, and beg 
for a corner where he might hide and hush 
himself in the dark } 

"That we shall in a higher life be able to 
do what we cannot in this, — judge fairly pf 
each other's moral worth, — is undoubtedly 
true. Whatever the Judgment Day may mean, 
that is the substance of it. But this promis- 
cuous theory of refraction ; — never ! 

"Besides, wherever the Bible touches the 
subject, it premises our individuality as a 
matter of course. What would be the use of 
talking, if everybody knew the thoughts of 
everybody else .'* '* 

" You don't suppose that people talk ia 
heaven ? " 



The Gates Ajar. 8 1 

" I don't suppose anything else. Are we to 
spend ages of joy, a company of mutes togeth- 
er ? Why not talk ? " 

" I supposed we should sing, — but — " 

** Why not talk as well as sing ? Does not 
song involve the faculty of speech ? — unless 
you would like to mako canaries of us." 

" Ye-es. Why, yes." 

" There are the visitors at the beautiful 
Mount of Transfiguration again. Did not they 
talk with each other and with Christ } Did 
not John talk with the angel who * shewed hira 
those things ' .? " . 

" And you mean to say — " 

*' I mean to say that if there is such a thing 
as common sense, you will talk with Roy as 
you talked with him here, — only not as you 
talked with him here, because there will be no 
troubles nor sins, no anxieties nor cares, to 
talk about ; no ugly shades of cross words or 
little quarrels to be made up ; no fearful look- 
ing-for of separation." 

■I laid my head upon her shoulder, and 
could hardly speak for the comfort that she 
gave me. 

" Yes, I believe we shall talk and laugh and 
joke and play — " 



82 The Gates Ajar. 

'* Laugh and joke in heaven ?" 

" Why not ? " 

"But it seems so — so — why, so wicked 
and irreverent and all that, you know." 

Just then Faith, who, mounted out on Ihe 
kitchen table, was preaching at Phoebe in com- 
ical mimicry of Dr. Bland's choicest intona^ 
tions, laughed out, like the splash of a little 
wave. 

The sound came in at the open door, and we 
stopped to listen till it had rippled away. 

" There ! " said her mother, " put that child, 
this very minute, with all her little sins forgiv- 
en, into one of our dear Lord's many mansions, 
and do you suppose that she would be any the 
less holy or less reverent for a laugh like that ? 
Is he going to check all the sparkle and blos- 
som of life when he takes us to himself.^ I 
don't believe any such thing. 

" There were both sense and Christianity 
in what somebody wrote on the death of a 
humorous poet : — 

'Does nobody laugh there, where he has gone, — 
This man of the smile and the jest ? ' 

— provided there was any hope that the poor 
fellow had gone to heaven ; if not, it was bad 
philosophy and worse religion. 



The Gates Ajar, 83 

* Did not David dance before the Lord with 
all his might ? A Bible which is full of happy 
battle-cries : * Rejoice in the Lord ! make a 
joyful noise unto him! Give thanks unto 
the Lord, for his mercy endureth ! ' — a Bible 
which exhausts its splendid wealth of rhetoric 
to make us understand that the coming life 
is a life oijoy, no more threatens to make nuns 
than mutes of us. I expect that you will 
hear some of Roy's very old jokes, see the 
sparkle in his eye, listen to his laughing voice, 
lighten up the happy days as gleefully as you 
may choose ; and that — " 

Faith appeared upon the scene just then, 
with the interesting information that she had 
bitten her tongue ; so we talked no more. 

How pleasant — how pleasant this is ! I 
^ever supposed before that God would let 
any one laugh in heaven. 

I wonder if Roy has seen the President. 
Aunt Winifred says she does not doubt it 
She thinks that all the soldiers must have 
crowded up to meet him, and "O," she says, 
" what a sight to see ! " 



84 The Gates Ajar, 



VII. 

May 12IK 

Aunt Winifred has said something about 
going, but 1 cannot yet bear to hear of such 
a thing. She is to stay a while longer. 

16th. 

We have been over to-night to the grave. 

She proposed to go by herself, thinking, I saw, 
with the delicacy with which she always thinks, 
that I would rather not be there with another. 
Nor should I, nor could I, with any other than 
this woman. It is strange. I wished to go 
there with her. I had a vague, unreasoning^ 
feeling that she would take away some of the 
bitterness of it, as she has taken the bitterness 
of much else. 

It is looking very pleasant there now. The 
iurf has grown fine and smooth. The low 
arbor-vitae hedge and knots of Norway spruce, 
that father planted long ago for mother, drop 
cool, green shadows that stir with the wind. 
My English ivy has crept about and about the 



The Gates Ajar. 85 

cross. Roy used to say that he should fancy 
a cross to mark the spot where he might lie ; 
I think he would like this pure, unveined mar- 
ble. May-flowers cover the grave now, and 
steal out among the clover-leaves with a flush 
like sunrise. By and by there will be roses^ 
and, in August, August's own white lilies. 

We went silently over, and sat silently down 
on the grass, the field-path stretching away to 
the little church behind us, and beyond, in 
front, the slope, the flats, the river, the hills cut 
in purple distance melting far into the east. 
The air was thick with perfume. Golden bees 
hung giddily over the blush in the gra^s. In 
the low branches that swept the grave a little 
bird had built her nest. 

Aunt Winifred did not speak to me for a 
^time, nor watch my face. Presently she laid 
her hand upon my lap, and I put mire into it. 

" It is very pleasant here," she said then, in 
her very pleasant voice. 

" I meant that it should be," I aiiswered, 
trying not to let her see my lips quiver. " At 
least it must not look neglected. I ^un\ sup- 
pose it makes any difference to ///?«." 

"I do not feel sure of that." 

" What do you mean ? " 



86 The Gates Ajar. 

" I do not feel sure that anything he has 
left makes no * difference* to him." 

" But I don't understand. He is in heaven. 
He would be too happy to care for anything 
that is going on in this woful world." 

" Perhaps that is so," she said, smiling a 
sweet contradiction to her words, " but I don't 
believe it." 

" What do you believe ? " 

" Many things that I have to say to you, but 
you cannot bear them now." 

" I have sometimes wondered, for I cannot 
help it," I said, " whether he is shut off from 
all knowledge of me for all these years till I 
can go to him. It will be a great while. It 
seems hard. Roy would want to know some- 
thing, if it were only a little, about me." 

" I believe that he wants to know, and that 
he knows, Mary ; though, since the belief must 
rest on analogy and conjecture, you need not 
accept it as demonstrated mathematics," she 
answered, with another smile. 

" Roy never forgot me here ! " I said, not 
meaning to sob. 

" That is just it. He was not constituted 
so that he, remaining himself, Roy, could for- 
get you. If he goes out into this other life 



The Gates Ajar. 87 

forgetting, he becomes another than himsel£ 
That is a far more unnatural way of creeping 
out of the difficulty than to assume that he loves 
and remembers. Why not assume that ? In 
fact, why assume anything else ? Neither rea- 
son, nor the Bible, nor common sense, forbids 
it. Instead of starting with it as an hypothesis 
to be proved if we can, I lay it down as one of 
those probabilities for which Butler would say, 
*the presumption amounts nearly to certainty' ; 
and if any one can disprove it, I will hear what 
he has to say. There ! " she broke off, laugh- 
ing softly, " that is a sufficient dose of meta- 
physics for such a simple thing. It seems 
to me to lie just here : Roy loved you. Our 
Father, for some tender, hidden reason, took 
him out of your sight for a while. Though 
changed mu :h, he can have forgotten nothing. 
Being only ntt of sight, you remember, not 
lost, nor asleep, nor annihilated, he goes on 
loving. To love must mean to think of, to 
care for, to hope for, to pray for, not less out 
of a body than in it." 

" But that must mean — why, that must 
mean — " 

" That he is near you. I do not doubt it** 
The sunshine quivered in among the ivy- 
leaves, and I turned to watch it, thinking. 



8S The Gates Ajar. 

" I do not doubt," she went on, speaking 
low, — "I cannot doubt that our absent dead 
are very present with us. He said, ' I am wi^h 
you alway,' knowing the need we have of him, 
even to the end of the world. He must under- 
stand the need we have of them. I cannot 
doubt it." 

I watched her as she sat with her absent 
eyes turned eastward, and her peculiar look — 
I have never seen it on another face — as of 
one who holds a happy secret ; and while I 
watched I wondered. 

" There is a reason for it," she said, rousing 
as if from a pleasant dream, — "a. good sensi- 
ble reason, too, it strikes me, independent of 
Scriptural or other proof." 

" What is that } " 

" That God keeps us briskly at work in thisr 
world." 

I did not understand. 

" Altogether too briskly, considering that it 
is a preparative world, to intend to put us from 
it into an idle one. What more natural than 
that we shall spend our best energies as we 
spent them here, — in comforting, teaching, 
helping, saving people whose very souls we 
love better than our own ? In fact, it would 
be very w;matural if we did not." 



The Gates Ajar, 89 

*'But I thought that God took care of us, 
and angels, like Gabriel and the rest, if I ever 
thought anything about it, which I am inclineJ 
to doubt.'* 

" ' God works by the use of means,' as tht. 
preachers say. Why not use Roy as well as 
Gabriel ? What archangel could understand 
and reach the peculiarities of your nature a? 
he could ? or, even if understanding, could so 
love and bear with you ? What is to be done ? 
Will they send Roy to the planet Jupiter to 
take care of somebody's else sister ? " 

I laughed in spite of myself; nor did the 
laugh seem to jar upon the sacred stillness 
of the place. Her words were drawing away 
the bitterness, as the sun was blotting the dull, 
dead greens of the ivy into its glow of golden 
color. 

'•' But the Bible, Aunt Winifred." 

" The Bible does nqt say a great deal on this 
point," she said, " but it does not contradict 
me. In fact, it helps me ; and, moreover, it 
would uphold me in black and white if it 
were n't for one little obstacle.^ 

" And that } " 

"That frowning 'original Greek,' which Gail 
Hamilton denounces with her righteous indig- 



90 T7ie Gates Ajar. 

nation. No sooner do I find a pretty verse 
that is exactly what I want, than up hops a 
commentator, and says, this is n't according 
to text, and means something entirely differ- 
ent ; and Barnes says this, and Stuart be- 
lieves that, and Olshausen has demonstrated 
the other, and very ignorant it is in you, too, 
not to know it ! Here the other day I ferreted 
out a sentence in Revelation that seemed to 
prove beyond question that angels and re- 
deemed men were the same ; where the angel 
says to John, you know, *Am I not of thy 
brethren the prophets ? ' I thought that I had 
discovered a delightful thing which all the 
Fathers of the church had overlooked, and 
went in great glee to your Uncle Calvin, to be 
told that something was the matter, — a noun 
left out, or some other unanswerable and unrea- 
sonable horror, I don't know what ; and that 
it did n't mean that he was of thy brethren 
the prophets at all ! 

" You see, if it could be proved that the 
Christian dead become angels, we could have 
all that we need, direct from God, about — to 
use the beautiful old phrase — the communion 
of saints. From Genesis to Revelation the 
Bible is filled with angels who are at work on 



The Gates Ajar, 91 

earth. They hold sweet converse with Abra- 
ham in his tent. They are intrusted to save 
the soul of Lot. An angel hears the wail of 
Hagar. The beautiful feet of an angel bring 
the good tidings to maiden Mary. An angel's 
noiseless step guides Peter through the barred 
and bolted gate. Angels rolled the stone from 
the buried Christ, and angels sat there in the 
solemn morning, — O Mary ! if we could 
have seen them ! 

'* Then there is that one question, direct, 
comprehensive, — we should not need anything 
else, — ' Are they not all ministering spirits, sent 
forth to minister to the heirs of salvation } ' 

"But. you see it never seems to have entered 
those commentators' heads that all these beau- 
tiful things refer to any but a superior race of 
beings, like those from whose ranks Lucifer 
fell." 

" How stupid in them ! " 

" I take comfort in thinking so ; but, to be 
serious, even admitting that these passages 
refer to a superior race, must there not be some 
similarity in the laws which govern existence 
in the heavenly world ? Since these gracious 
deeds are performed by what we are accus- 
tomed to call * spiritual beings,' why may they 



92 The Gates Ajar, 

not as well be done by people from this world 
as from anywhere else ? Besides^ there is 
another point, and a reasonable one, to be 
made. The word angel in the original * means, 
strictly, a viessengcr. It applies to any servant 
of God, animate or inanimate. An east wind 
is as much an angel as Michael. Again, the 
generic terms, * spirits,' * gods,' ' sons of God,* 
are used interchangeably for saints and for 
angels. So, you see, I fancy that I find a way 
for you and Roy and me and all of us, straight 
into the shining ministry. Mary, Mary, 
would n't you like to go this very afternoon } '* 

She iay back in the grass, with her face up- 
turned to the sky, and drew a long, breath, 
wearily. I do not think she meant me to hear 
it. I did not answer her, for it came over me 
with such a hopeless thrill, how good it 
would be to be taken to Roy, there by his 
beautiful grave, with the ivy and the May- 
flowers and the sunlight and the clover-leaves 
round about ; and that it could not be, and 
how long it was to wait, — it came over me so 
that I could not speak. 

"There!" she said, suddenly rousing, "what 
a thoughtless, wicked thing it was to say ! 

* ayyeXos. 



The Gates Ajar, 93 

And I meant to give you only the good cheer 
of a cheery friend. No, I do not care to go this 
afternoon, nor any afternoon, till my Father 
is ready for me. Wherever he has most 
for me to do, there I wish, — yes, I think I 
uuish to stay. He knows best." 

After a pause, I asked again, " Why did He 
not tell us more about this thing, — about their 
presence with us t You see if I could know 
it!" 

" The mystery of the Bible lies not so much 
in what it says, as in what it does not say," she 
replied. "But I suppose that we have been 
told all that we can comprehend in this world. 
Knowledge on one point might involve knowl- 
edge on another, like the links of a chain, till 
it stretched far beyond our capacity. At any 
rate, it is not for me to break the silence. 
That is God's affair. I can only accept the 
fact. Nevertheless, as Dr. Chalmers says : * If 
were well for us all could we carefully draw 
the line between the secret things which be- 
long to God and the things which are revealed 
and belonsr to us and to our children.' Some 
one else, — Whately, I think, — I remember to 
have noticed as speaking about these very sub- 
jects to this effect, — that precisely because we 



94 ^^'^ Gates Ajar, 

know so little of them, it is the more important 
that we * should endeavor so to dwell on them 
as to make the most of what little knowledge 
we have.' " 

" Aunt Winifred, you are such a comfort ! " 
"It needs our best faith," she^said, "to bear 
this reticence of God. I cannot help thinking 
sometimes of a thing Lauderdale said, — I am 
always quoting him, — from 'Son of the Soil/ 
you remember : * It 's an awfu marvel, beyond 
my reach, when a word of communication 
would make a' the difference, why it 's no per- 
mitted, if it were but to keep a heart from 
breaking now and then.' Think of poor 
Eugenie de Guerin, trying to continue her 
little journal * To Maurice in Heaven,' till the 
awful, answerless stillness shut up the book 
and laid aside the pen. 

" But then," she continued, " there is this 
to remember, — I may have borrowed the 
idea, or it may be my own, — that if we could 
speak to them, or they to us, there would 
be no death, for there would be no separa- 
tion. The last, the surest, in some cases the 
only test of loyalty to God, would thus be 
taken away. Roman Catholic nature is hu- 
man nature, when it comes upon its knees 



The Gates Ajar. 95 

before a saint. Many lives — all such lives as 
yours and mine — would become — '* 

" Would become what ? " 

" One long defiance to the First Command- 
ment." 

I cannot become used to such words from 
such quiet lips. Yet they give me a curious 
sense of the trustworthiness of her peace. 
" Founded upon a rock," it seems to be. She 
has done what it takes a lifetime for some of us 
to do ; what some of us go into eternity, 
leaving undone ; what I am afraid I shall never 
do, — sounded her own nature. She knows 
the worst of herself, and faces it as fairly, I be- 
lieve, as anybody can do in this world. As 
for the best of herself, she trusts that to Christ, 
and he knows it, and we. I hope she, in her 
sweet humbleness, will know it some day. 

" I suppose, nevertheless," she said, " that 
Roy knows what you are doing and feeling as 
well as, perhaps better than, he knew it three 
months ago. So he can help you without 
harming you." 

I asked her, turning suddenly, how that 
could be, and yet heaven be heaven, — how he 
could see me suffer what I had suffered, could 
see me sometimes when I supposed none but 



g6 The Gates Ajar, 

God had seen me, — and sing on and be 
happy. 

" You are not the first, Mary, and you will 
not be the last, to ask that question. I can- 
not answer it, and I never heard of any who 
could. I feel sure only of this, — that he would 
suffer far less to see you than to know nothing 
about you ; and that God's power of inventing 
happiness is not to be blocked by an obstacle 
like this. Perhaps Roy sees the end from the 
beginning, and can bear the sight of pain for 
the peace that he watches coming to meet 
you. I do not know, — that does not perplex 
me now ; it only makes me anxious for one 
thing." 

" What is that t " 

" That you and I shall not do anything to 
make them sorry.'* 

" To make them sorry ? " 

" Roy would care. Roy would be disap- 
pointed to see you make life a hopeless thing 
for his sake, or to see you doubt his Saviour." 

"Do you think that?'' 

" Some sort of mourning over sin enters 
that happy life. God himself * was grieved ' 
forty years long over his wandering people. 
Among the angels there has been * silence/ 



The Gates Ajar. 97 

whatever that mysterious pause may mean, 
just as there is joy over one sinner that 
repenteth ; another of my proof-texts that, to 
show that they are allowed to keep us in 
sight." 

" Then you think, you really think, that Roy 
remembers and loves and takes care of me ; 
that he has been listening, perhaps, and is — 
why, you don't think he may be here ? " 

" Yes, I do. Here, close beside you all this 
time, trying to speak to you through the bless- 
ed sunshine and the flowers, trying to help 
you, and sure to love you, — right here, dear. 
I do not believe God means to send him away 
from you, either." 

My heart was too full to answer her. 
Seeing how it was, she slipped away, and, stroll- 
ing out of sight with her face to the eastern 
hills, left me alone. 

And yet I did not seem alone. The low 
branches swept with a little soft sigh across 
the grave ; the May-flowers wrapped me in 
with fragrance thick as incense ; the tiny 
sparrow turned her soft eyes at me over the 
edge of the nest, and chirped contentedly ; the 
" blessed sunshine " talked with m.e as it 
touched the edges of the ivy-leaves to fire. 
S O 



98 The Gates Ajar. 

I cannot write it even here, how these 
things stole into my heart and hushed me. If 
I had seen him standing by the stainless cross, 
it would not have frightened or surprised me. 
There — not dead or gone, but there — it helps 
me, and makes me strong ! 

" Mamie ! little Mamie ! " 

O Roy, I will try to bear it all, if you will 
only stay ! 



The Gates Ajar, 99 



VIII. 

May 20, 

The nearer the time has come for Aunt 
Winifred to go, the more it has seemed impos- 
sible to part with her. I have run away from 
the thought like a craven, till she made me 
face it this morning, by saying decidedly that 
she should go on the first of the week. 

I dropped my sewing ; the work-basket 
tipped over, and all my spools rolled away 
under the chairs. I had a little time to think 
while I was picking them up. 

" There is the rest of my visit at Norwich to 
be made, you know," she said, " and while I 
am there I shall form some definite plans for 
the summer ; I have hardly decided what, yet. 
I had better leave here by the seven o'clock 
train, if such an early start will not incommode 
you." 

I wound up the last spool, and turned away 
to the window. There was a confused, dreary 
sky of scurrying clouds, and a cold wind was 



J 00 The Gates Ajar. 

bruising the apple-buds. I hate a coLl wind 
in May. It made me choke a little, thinking 
how I should sit and listen to it after she was 
gone, — of the old, blank, comfortless days that 
must come and go, — of what she had brought, 
and what she would take away. I was a bit 
faint, I think, for a minute. I had not really 
thought the prospect through, before. 

"Mary," she said, "what's the matter? 
Come here." 

I went over, and she drew me into her lap, 
and I put my arms about her neck. 

" I can not bear it," said I, " and that is the 
matter." 

She smiled, but her smile faded when she 
looked at me. 

And then I told her, sobbing, how it was ; 
that I could not go into my future alone, — I 
could not do it ! that she did not know how 
weak I was, — and reckless, — and wicked ; that 
she did not know what she had been to me. 
I begged her not to leave me. I begged her 
to stay and help me bear my life. 

" My dear ! you are as bad as Faith when I 
put her to bed alone." 

" But," I said, " when Faith cries, you go to 
her, you know." 



^ The Gates Ajar. lOi 

'* Are you quite in earnest, Maiy ? " she 
asked, after a pause. " You don't know very 
much about me, after all, and there is the 
child. It is always an experiment, bringing 
two families into lifelong relations under one 
roof. If I could think it best, you might re- 
pent your bargain." 

" / am not * a family,' " I said, feebly trying 
to laugh. " Aunt Winifred, if you and Faith 
only will make this your home, I can never 
thank you, never. I shall be entertaining ray 
good angels, and that is the whole of it." 

" I have had some thought of not going back," 
she said at last, in a low, constrained voice, as 
if she were touching something that gave her 
great pain, *' for Faith's sake. I should like to 
educate her in New England, if — I had in- 
tended if we stayed to rent or buy a little 
home of our own somewhere, but I had been 
putting off a decision. We are most weak 
and most selfish sometimes when we think 
ourselves strongest and noblest, Mary. I love 
my husband's people. I think they love me. 
I was almost happy with them. It seemed as 
if I were carrying on his work for him. That 
was so pleasant ! " 

She put me down out of her arms and walked 
across the room. 



102 The Gates Ajar, 

" I will think the matter over," she said, by 
and by, in her natural tones, " and let you know 
to-night." 

She went away up stairs then, and I did no*; 
see her again until to-night. I sent Faith up 
with her dinner and tea, judging that she 
wouW rather see the child than me. I ob- 
served, when the dishes came down, tliat shfe 
had touched nothing but a cup of coffee. 

I began to understand, as I sat alone in the 
parlor through the afternoon, how much I had 
asked of her. In my selfish distress at losing 
her, I had not thought of that. Faces that 
her husband loved, meadows and hills and sun- 
sets that he has watched, the home where his 
last step sounded and his last word was spoken, 
the grave where she has laid him, — this last 
more than all, — call after her, and cling to 
her with yearning closeness. To leave them, 
is to leave the last faint shadow of her beautiful 
past. It hurts, but she is too brave to cry out. 

Tea was over, and Faith in bed, but still she 
did not come down. I was sitting by the win- 
dow, watching a little crescent moon climb over 
the hills, and wondering whether I had better 
go up, when she came in and stood behind me. 
and said, attempting to laugh : — 



The Gates Ajar, 103 

*' Ver)^ impolite in me to run off so, was n't 
it ? Cowardly, too, I think. Well, Mary ? " 

•" Well, Auntie ? " 

" Have you not repented your proposition 
yet?" 

"You would excel as an inquisitor, Mrs. 
Forceythe ! " 

" Then it shall be as you say ; as long as 
you want us you shall have us, — Faith and 
me." 

I turned to thank her, but could not when 
I saw her face. It was very pale ; there was 
something inexpressibly sad about her mouth, 
and her eyelids drooped heavily, like one weary 
from a great struggle. 

Feeling for the moment guilty and ashamed 
before her, as if I had done her wrong, "It is 
going to be very hard for you," I said. 

" Never mind about that," she answered, 
quickly. " We will not talk about that. I 
knew, though I did not wish to know, that it 
was best for Faith. Your hands about my 
neck have settled it. Where the work is, there 
the laborer must be. It is quite plain now. 
I have been talking it over with them all the 
afternoon ; it seems to be what they want." 

" With than " ? I started at the words ; who 



104 ^^^^ Gates Ajar, 

had been in her lonely chamber? Ah, it is 
simply real to her. Wlio, indeed, but her 
Saviour and her husband ? 

She did not seem inclined to talk, and stole 
away from m^ presently, and out of doors ; she 
was wrapped in her blanket shawl, and had 
thrown a shimmering white hood over her gray 
hair. I wondered where she could be going, 
and sat still at the window watching her. She 
opened and shut the gate softly ; and, turning 
her face towards the churchyard, walked up 
the street and out of my sight. 

She feels nearer to him in the resting-place 
of the dead. Her heart cries after the grave 
by which she will never sit and weep again ; 
on which she will never plant the roses any 
more. 

As I sat watching and thinking this, the 
faint' light struck her slight figure and Httle 
shimmering hood again, and she walked down 
the street and in with steady step. 

When she came up and stood beside me, 
smiling, with the light knitted thing thrown 
back on her shoulders, her face seemed to rise 
from it as from a snowy cloud ; and for hei 
look, — I wish Raphael could have had it for 
one of his rapt Madonnas. 



The Gates Ajar. 1 05 

"Now, Mary," she said, with the sparkle 
back again in her voice, " I am ready to be 
entertaining, and promise not to play the 
hermit again very soon. Shall I sit here on 
the sofa with you ? Yes, my dear, I am happy, 
quite happy." 

So then we took this new promise of home 
that has come to make my life, if not joyful, 
something less than desolate, and analyzed it 
in its practical bearings. What a pity that all 
pretty dreams have to be analyzed ! I had 
some notion about throwing our little incomes 
into a joint family fund, but she put a veto to 
that ; I suppose because mine is the larger. 
She prefers to take board for herself and Faith ; 
but, if I know myself, she shall never be suf- 
fered to have the feeling of a boarder, and I 
will make her so much at home in my house 
that she shall not remember that it is not her 
own. 

Her visit to Norwich she has decided to put 
off until the autumn, so that I shall have her 
to myself undisturbed all summer. 

I have been looking at Roy's picture a long 
time, and wondering how he would like the 
new plan. I said something of the sort to her. 

" Why put any * would ' in that sentence ?** 
5* 



lo6 The Gates Ajar. 

she said, smiling. " It belongs in the present 
tense." 

" Then I am sure he likes it," I answered, 
—■ " he likes it," and I said the words over till 
I was ready to cry for rest in their sweet 
sound. 

22d. 

It is Roy's birthday. But I have not spoken 
of it. We used to make a great deal of these 
little festivals, — but it is of no use to write 
about that. 

I am afraid I have been bearing it very badly 
all day. She noticed my face, but said nothing 
till to-night. Mrs. Bland was down stairs, and 
I had come away alone up here in the dark. 
I heard her asking for me, but would not go 
down. By and by Aunt Winifred knocked, 
and I let her in. 

"Mrs. Bland cannot understand why you 
don't see her, Mary," she said, gently. " You 
know you have not thanked her for those 
English violets that she sent the other day. 
I only thought I would remind you ; she might 
feel a little pained." 

" I can't to-night, — not to-night, Aunt Wini- 
fred. You must excuse me to her somehow. 
I don't want to go down," 



The Gates Ajar. — 107 

**U It that you don t * want to,' or is it that 
you can't ? " she said, in that gentle, motherly 
way of hers, at which I can never take offence. 
"Mary, I wonder if Roy would not a little 
rather that you would go down ? " 

It might have been Roy himself who spoke. 

I went down. 



io8 The Gates Ajar* 



IX. 

Jimo L 

Aunt Winifred went to the office this morn- 
ing, and met Dr. Bland, who walked home 
with her. He always likes to talk with her. 

A woman who knows something about fate, 
free-will, and foreknowledge absolute, who is 
not ignorant of politics, and talks intelligently 
of Agassiz's latest fossil, who can understand a 
German quotation, and has heard of Strauss 
and Neander, who can dash her sprightliness 
ably against his old dry bones of metaphysics 
and theology, yet never speak an accent above 
that essentially womanly voice of hers, is, I 
imagine, a phenomenon in his social experi- 
ence. 

I was sitting at the window when they came 
up and stopped at the gate. Dr. Bland lifted 
his hat to me in his grave way, talking the 
while ; somewhat eagerly, too, I could see. 
Aunt Winifred answered him with a peculiar 
smile and a few low words that I could not 
hear. 

" But, my dear madam," he said, " the glory 



The Gates Ajar. 109 

of God, you see, the glory of God is the pri- 
mary consideration." 

" But the glory of God involves these lesser 
glories, as a sidereal system, though a splendid 
whole, exists by the multiplied differing of one 
star from another star. Ah, Dr. Bland, you 
make a grand abstraction out of it, but it 
makes me cold," — she shivered, half playfully, 
half involuntarily, — " it makes me cold. I am 
very much alive and human ; and Christ was 
human God." 

She came in srr/ling a little sadly, and stood 
by me, watching the minister walk over the 
hill. 

" How much does that man love his wife 
and children 1 " she asked abruptly. 

"A good deal. Why.?" 

" I am afraid that he will lose one of them 
then, before many more years of his life are 
past." 

" What ! he has n't been telling you that 
they are consumptive or anything of the 
sort ? " 

" O dear me, no," with a merry laugh which 
died quickly away : " I was only thinking, — ■ 
there is trouble in store for him ; some in- 
tense pain, — if he is capable of intense pain. 



no The Gates Ajar, 

— which shall shake his cold, smooth theoriz- 
ing to the foundation. He speaks a foreign 
tongue when he talks of bereavement, of death, 
of the future life. No argument could con- 
vince him of that, though, which is the worst 
of it." 

" He must think you shockingly heterodox." 

" I don't doubt it. We had a little talk this 
morning, and he regarded me with an expres- 
sion of mingled consternation and perplexity 
that was curious. He is a very good man. 
He is not a stupid man. I only wish that he 
would stop preaching and teaching things that 
he knows nothing about. 

" He is only drifting with the tide, though," 
she added, " in his views of this matter. In 
our recoil from the materialism of the Romish 
Church, we have, it seems to me, nearly 
stranded ourselves on the opposite shore. 
Just as, in a rebound from the spirit which 
would put our Saviour on a level with Buddha 
or Mahomet, we have been in danger of for- 
getting * to begin as the Bible begins,' with his 
humanity. It is the grandeur of inspiration, 
that it knows how to balance truth." 

It had been in my mind for several days to 
ask Aunt Winifred something, and, feeling in 



The Gates Ajar. in 

the mood, I made her take off her things and 
devote herself to me My question concerned 
what we call the " intermediate stata'* 

" I have been expecting that," she said ; 
" what about it ? " 

"What /jit?" 

" Life and activity." 
. " Wc do not go to sleep, of course." 

" I believe that notion is about exploded, 
though clear thinkers like Whately have ap- 
peared to advocate it. Where it originated, I 
do not know, unless from the frequent compar- 
isons in the Scriptures of death with sleep, 
which refer solely, I am convinced, to the 
condition of body, and which are voted down 
by an overwhelming majority of decided 
statements relative to the consciousness, happi- 
ness, and tangibility of the life into which we 
hnmediately pass." 

" It is intermediate, in some sense, I sup- 
pose." 

" It waits between two other conditions, — 
yes ; I think the drift of what we are taught 
about it leads to that conclusion. I expect to 
become at once sinless, but to have a broader 
Christian character many years hence ; to be 
happy at once, but to be happier by and by ; 



TI2 The Gates AJat. 

to find in myself wonderful new tastes and 
capacities, which are to be immeasurably en- 
nobled and enlarged after the Resurrection, 
whatever that may mean." 

" What does it mean ? '* 

" I know no more than you, but you shall 
hear what I think, presently. I was going to 
say that this seems to be plain enough in the 
Bible. The angels took Lazarus at once to 
Abraham. Dives seems to have found no 
interval between death and consciousness of 
suffering." 

"They always tell you that that is only a 
parable." 

" But it must mean something. No story in 
the Bible has been pulled to pieces and twist- 
ed about as that has been. We are in danger 
of pulling and twisting all sense out of it 
Then Judas, having hanged his wretched self, 
went to his own place. Besides, there wa3 
Christ's promise to the thief" 

I told her that I had heard Dr. Bland say 
that we could not place much dependence on 
that passage, because " Paradise " did not ne- 
cessarily mean heaven. 

" But it meant living, thinking, enjoying ; for 
To-day thou shalt be with me^ Paul'sbeauti- 



The Gates Ajar, 113 

ful perplexed revery, however, would be enough 
If it stood alone ; for he did not know whether 
he would rather stay in this world, or depart 
and be with Christ, which is far better. Witl 
Christ, you see ; and His three mysterious days, 
which typify our intermediate state, were 
over then, and he had ascended to his Father. 
Would it be * far better ' either to leave this 
actual tangible life throbbing with hopes and 
passions, to leave its busy, Christ-like working, 
its quiet joys, its very sorrows which are near 
and human, for a nap of several ages, or even 
for a vague, lazy, half-alive, disembodied exist- 
ence ? " 

" Disembodied ? I supposed, of course, that 
it was disembodied." 

" I do not think so. And that brings us to 
the Resurrection. All the tendatcy of Revela- 
tion is to show that an embodied state is supe- 
rior to a disembodied one. Yet certainly we 
who love God are promised that death will 
lead us into a condition which shall have the 
advantage of this : for the good apostle to die 
*was gain.' I don't believe, for instance, that 
Adam and Eve have been wandering about in 
a misty condition all these thousands of years. 
I suspect that we have some sort of body 

H 



114 The Gates Ajar, 

immediately after passing out of this, but that 
there is to come a mysterious change, equiva- 
lent, perhaps, to a re-embodiment, when our ca- 
pacities for action will be greatly improved, and 
that in some manner this new form will be con- 
nected with this * garment by the soul laid by.' " 

" Deacon Quirk expects to rise in his own 
entire, original body, after it has lain in the 
First Church cemetery a proper number of 
years, under a black slate headstone, adorned 
by a willow, and such a ' cherubim ' as that 
poor boy shot, — by the way, if I 've laughed 
at that story once, I have fifty times." 

" Perhaps Deacon Quirk would admire a 
work of art that I found stowed away on the 
-top of your Uncle Calvin's bookcases. It was 
an old woodcut — nobody knows how old — 
of an interesting skeleton rising from his grave, 
and, in a sprightly and modest manner, draw- 
ing on his skin, while Gabriel, with apoplectic 
cheeks, feet uppermost in the air, was blowing 
a good-sized tin trumpet in his ear ! 

" No ; some of the popular notions of resur- 
rection are simple physiological impossibihties, 
from causes * too tedious to specify.' Imagine, 
for instance, the resurrection of two Hotten- 
tots, one of whom has happened to make a 



The Gates Ajar. 115 

• 

dinner of the other some fine day. A little 
complication there ! Or picture the touching 
scene, when that devoted husband, King Mau- 
solas, whose widow had him burned and ate 
the ashes, should feel moved to .institute a 
search for his body ! It is no wonder that 
the infidel argument has the best of it, when 
we attempt to enforce a natural impossibility. 
It is worth while to remember that Paul ex- 
pressly stated that we shall not rise in our 
entire earthly bodies. The simile which he 
used is the seed sown, dying in, and mingling 
with, the ground. How many of its original 
particles are found in the full-grown corn t " 

" Yet you believe that something belonging 
to this body is preserved for the completion of 
another .? " 

" Certainly. I accept God's statement about 
it, which is as plain as words can make a state- 
ment. I do not know, and I do not care to 
know, how it is to be effected. God will not 
be at a loss for a way, any more than he is at a 
loss for a way to make his fields blossom every 
spring. For aught we know, some invisible 
compound of an annihilated body may hover, 
by a divine decree, around the site of death 
till it is wanted, — sufficient to preserve identity 



Ii6 The Gates Ajar. 

• 

as strictly as a body can ever be said to pre- 
serve it ; and stranger things have happened. 
You remember the old Mohammedan belief 
in the one little bone which is imperishable. 
Prof. Bush's idea of our triune existence is 
suggestive, for a notion. He believed, you 
know, that it takes a material body, a spiritual 
body, and a soul, to make a man. The spirit- 
ual body is enclosed within the material, the 
soul within the spiritual. Death is simply the 
slipping off of the outer body, as a husk slips 
off from its kernel. The deathless frame 
stands ready then for the soul's untrammelled 
occupation. But it is a waste of time to spec- 
ulate over such useless fancies, while so many 
remain that will vitally affect our happiness." 

It is singular ; but I never gave a serious 
thought — and I have done some thinking 
about other matters — to my heavenly body, 
till that moment, while I sat listening to her. 
In fact, till Roy went, the Future was a mis- 
erable, mysterious blank, to be drawn on and 
on in eternal and joyless monotony, and to 
which, at times, annihilation seemea preferable. 
I remember, when I was a child, asking father 
once, if I were so good that I had to go to 
heaven, whether, after a hundred years, God 



' The Gates Ajar. 117 

would not let me " die out." More or less of 
the disposition of that same desperate little 
sinner I suspect has always clung to me. So 
I asked Aunt Winifred, in some perplexity, 
what she supposed our bodies would be like. 

" It must be nearly all * suppose/ " she said, 
" for we are nowhere definitely told. But this 
is certain. They will be as real as these." 

" But these you can see, you can touch." 

" What would be the use of having a body 
that you can't see and touch ? A body is a 
bodyy not a spirit. Why should you not, having 
seen Roy's old smile and heard his own voice, 
clasp his hand again, and feel his kiss on your 
happy lips } 

" It is really amusing," she continued, " to 
sum up the notions that good people — excel- 
lent people — even thinking people — have of 
the heavenly body. Vague visions of floating 
about in the clouds, of balancing — with a 
white robe on, perhaps — in stiff rows about 
a throne, like the angels in the old pictures, 
converging to an apex, or ranged in semi- 
circles like so many marbles. Murillo has one 
charming exception. I always take a secret 
delight in that little cherub of his, kicking the 
clouds, in the right-hand upper corner of 



Ii8 The Gates Ajar. 

the Immaculate Conception ; he seems to be 
having a good time of it, in genuine baby- 
fashion. The truth is, that the ordinary idea, 
if sifted accurately, reduces our eternal per- 
sonality to — gas, 

" Isaac Taylor holds, that, as far as the ab- 
stract idea of spirit is concerned, it may just 
as reasonably be granite as ether. 

"Mrs. Charles says a pretty thing about 
this. She thinks these * super-spiritualized 
angels ' very * unsatisfactory ' beings, and that 
*the heart returns with loving obstinacy to 
the young men in long white garments ' who 
sat waiting in the sepulchre. 

" Here again I cling to my conjecture about 
the word 'angel' ; for then we should learn em- 
phatically something about our future selves. 

" * As the angels in heaven,' or * equal unto 
the angels,* we are told in another place, — that 
may mean simply what it says. At least, if 
we are to resemble them in the particular 
respect ' of which the words were spoken, — 
and that one of the most important which 
could well be selected, — it is not unreasonable 
to infer that we shall resemble them in others. 
*In the Resurrection,' by the way, means, in 
that connection and in many others, simply 



The Gates Ajar. iig 

future state of existence, without any reference 
to the time at which the great bodily change 
is to come. 

" * But this is a digression/ as the novelists 
say. I was going to say, that it bewilders me 
to conjecture where students of the Bible have 
discovered the usual foggy nonsense about the 
corporeity of heaven. 

" If there is anything laid down in plain 
statement, devoid of metaphor or parable, sim- 
ple and unequivocal, it is the definite contra- 
diction of all that. Paul, in his preface to that 
sublime apostrophe to death, repeats and re- 
iterates it, lest we should make a mistake in 
his meaning. 

" ' There are celestial bodies^ * It is raised 
a spiritual body! * There is a spiritual body! 
* It is raised in incorruption.* ' It ts raised 
in glory.' * It zs raised in power.* Moses, too, 
when he came to the transfigured mount in 
glory, had as real a body as when he went 
into the lonely mount to die." 

*' But they will be different from these } " 

"The glory of the terrestrial is one, the 
glory of the celestial another. Take away 
sin and sickness and misery, and that of itseli 
would make difference enough." 



120 The Gates Ajar. 

"You do not suppose that we shall look 
as we look now ? " 

" I certainly do. At least, I think it more 
than possible that the 'human form divine/ 
or something like it, is to be retained. Not 
only from the fact that risen Elijah JDore it; 
and Moses, who, if he had not passed through 
his resurrection, does not seem to have looked 
different from the other, — I have to use those 
two poor prophets on all occasions, but, as 
we are told of them neither by parable nor 
picture, they are important, — and that angels 
never appeared in any other, but because, in 
sinless Eden, God chose it for Adam and Eve. 
What came in unmarred beauty direct from 
His hand cannot be unworthy of His other 
Paradise 'beyond the stars.' It would chime 
in pleasantly, too, with the idea of Redemp- 
tion, that our very bodies, free from all the 
distortion of guilt, shall return to something 
akin to the pure ideal in which He moulded 
them. Then there is another reason, and 
stronger." 

*' What is that t " 

" The human form has been borne and dig- 
nified forever by Christ. And, further than 
that, He ascended to His Father in it, and lives 
there in it as human God to-day." 



The Gates Ajar, 121 

I had never thought of that, and said so. 

"Yes, with the very feet which trod the dusty 
road to Emmaus ; the very wounded hands 
which Thomas torched, beheving ; the very 
lips which ate of the broiled fish and honey- 
comb ; the very voice which murmured * Mary ! ' 
in the garden, and which told her that He as- 
cended unto His Father and her Father, to His 
God and her God, He * was parted from them,' 
and was ' received up into heaven.' His 
death and resurrection stand forever the great 
prototype of ours. Otherwise, what is the 
meaning of such statements as these : ' When 
He shall appear, we shall be like Him' ; * The 
first man (Adam) is of the earth ; the second 
man is the Lord. As we have borne the image 
of the earthy, we shall also bear the image of 
the Jicavcnly ' } And what of this, when we 
are told that our 'vile bodies,' being changed, 
shall be fashioned ' like tuito His glorious 
body ' .^ " 

I asked her if she inferred from that, that 
we should have just such bodies as the free- 
dom from pain and sin would make of these. 

"Flesh and blood cannot inherit the king-* 
dom," she said. "There is no escaping that, 
even if I had the smallest desire to escape 
6 



122 The Gates Ajar. 

it, which I have not. Whatever is essentially 
earthly and temporary in the arrangements of 
this world will be out of place and unneces- 
sary there. Earthly and temporary, flesh and 
blood certainly are." 

"Christ said 'A spirit hath not flesh and 
bones, as ye see me have." 

" A spirit hath not ; and who ever said that 
it did .-* His body had something that ap- 
peared like them, certainly. That passage, by 
the way, has led some ingenious writer on 
the Chemistry of Heaven to infer that our 
bodies there will be like these, minus blood ! 
I don't propose to spend my time over such 
investigations. Summing up the meaning of 
the story of those last days before the Ascen- 
sion, and granting the shade of mystery which 
hangs over them, I gather this, — that the spirit- 
ual body is real, is tangible, is visible, is hu- 
man, but that * we shall be changed.' Some 
indefinable but thorough change had come 
over Him. He could withdraw Himself from 
the recognition of Mary, and from the disci- 
ples, whose * eyes were holden,' as it pleased 
Him. He came and went through baried and 
bolted doors. He appeared suddenly in a cer- 
tain place, without sound of footstep or flutter 



The Gates Ajar. 123 

of garment to announce His approach. He 
vanished, and was not, like a cloud. New and 
wonderful powers had been given to Him, of 
which, probably, His little bewildered group 
of friends saw but a few illustrations." 

" And He was yet man ? " 

" He was Jesus of Nazareth until the sorrow- 
ful drama of human life that He had taken 
upon Himself was thoroughly finished, from 
manger to sepulchre, and from sepulchre to 
the right hand of His Father." 

"I like to wonder," she said, presently, "what 
we are going to look like and be like. Our- 
selves, in the first place. ' It is I Myself,* 
Christ said. Then to be perfectly well, never 
a sense of pain or weakness, — imagine how 
much solid comfort, if one had no other, in 
being forever rid of all the ills that flesh is 
heir to ! Beautiful, too, I suppose we shall be, 
every one. Have you never had that come 
over you, with a thrill of compassionate thank- 
fulness, when you have seen a poor girl shrink- 
ing, as only girls can shrink, under the life-long 
affliction of a mar:'ed face or form } The loss 
or presence of beauty is not as slight a depri- 
vation or blessing as the moralists would make 
it out. Your grandmother, who was the most 



124 The Gates Ajar, 

beautiful woman I ever saw, the belle of the 
county all her young days, and the model for 
artists* fancy sketching even in her old ones, 
as modest as a violet and as honest as the sun- 
shine, used to have the prettiest little way 
when we girls were in our teens, and she 
thought that we must be lectured a bit on 
youthful vanity, of adding, in her quiet voice, 
smoothing down her black silk apron as she 
spoke, *But still it is a thing to be thankful 
for, my dear, to have a comely cotmtenance! 

" But to return to the track and our future 
bodies. We shall find them vastly convenient, 
undoubtedly, with powers of which there is no 
dreaming. Perhaps they will be so one with the 
soul that to will will be to do, — hindrance out 
of the question. I, for instance, sitting here 
by you, and thinking that. I should like to 
be in Kansas, would be there. There is an 
interesting bit of a hint in Daniel about 
Gabriel, who, * being caused to fly swiftly, 
touched him about the time of the evening 
oblation.' " 

" But do you not make a very mater al kind 
of heaven out of such suppositions .-* " 

"It depends upon what yor mean by 'mate- 
rial/ Th^ term does not, to my thinking, imply 



The Gates Ajar, 125 

degradation, except so far as it is associated 
with sin. Dr. Chalmers has the right of it, 
when he talks about ' spiritual matci'ialism! 
He says in his sermon on the New Heavens 
and Earth, — which, by the way, you should 
read, and from which I wish a few more of 
our preachers would learn something, — that 
we 'forget that on the birth of materialism, 
when it stood out in the freshness of those 
glories which the great Architect of Nature 
had impressed upon it, that then the " morning 
stars sang together, and all the sons of God 
shouted for joy.'" I do not believe in a gross 
heaven, but I believe in ^treasonable one." 

4th. 

We have been devoting ourselves to feminin . 
vanities all day out in the orchard. Aui i 
Winifred has been making her summer bonnet, 
and I some linen collars. I saw, though she 
said nothing, that she thought the crepe a little 
gloomy, and I am going to wear these in the 
mornings to please her. 

She has an accumulation of work on hand, 
and in the afternoon I offered to tuck a little 
dress for Faith, — the prettiest pink barege 
ailair pale as a blush rose, and about as deli- 



126 The Gates Ajar. 

cate. Faith, who had been making mud-piea 
in the swamp, and was spattered with black 
peat from curls to stockings, looked on ap- 
provingly, and wanted it to wear on a flag-root 
expedition to-morrow. It seemed to do me 
good to do something for somebody aftei all 
this lonely and — I suspect — selfish idleness. 

6th. 

I read a little of Dr. Chalmers to-day, and 
went laughing to Aunt Winifred with the first 
sentence. 

" There is a limit to the revelations of the 
Bible about futurit/, and it were a mental or 
spiritual trespass to go beyond it." 

"Ah! but," she said, "look a little farther 
down." 

And I readj " But while we attempt not to 
be * wise above that which is written,' we should 
attempt, and that most studiously, to be wise 
/// to that which is written." 

. 8th. 

It occurred to me to-day, that it was a notice- 
able fact, that, among all the visits of angels to 
this world of which we are told, no one seems 
to have discovered in any the presence of a 



The Gates Ajar. 1 27 

dead friend If redeemed men are subject to 
the same laws as they, why did such a thing 
never happen ? I asked Aunt Winifred, and 
she said that the question reminded her of 
St. Augurtine's lonely cry thirty years after 
the death )f Monica : " Ah, the dead do not 
come bac^i; for, had it been possible, there 
has not been a night when I should not have 
seen my mother ! " There seemed to be two 
reasons, she said, why there should be no ex- 
ceptions to the law of silence imposed between 
us and those who have left us ; one of which 
was, that we should be overpowered with famil- 
iar curiosity about them, which nobody seems 
to have dared to express in the presence of 
angels, and the secrets of their life God has 
decreed that it is unlawful to utter. 

"But Lazarus, and Jairus's little daughter, 
and the dead raised at the Crucifixion, — what 
of them } " I asked. 

" I cannot help conjecturing that they were 
suffered to forget their glimpse of spiritual 
life," she said. " Since their resurrection was a 
miracle, there might be a miracle throughout. 
At least, their lips must have been sealed, for 
not a word of their testimony has been saved. 
When Lazarus dined with Simon, after he 



128 The Gates Ajar. 

had come back to life, — and of that feast 
we have a minute account in, I believe, every 
Gospel, — nobody seems to have asked, or he 
to have answered, any questions about it. 

" The other reason is a sorrowfully sufficient 
one. It is that every lost darling has not gone 
to heaven. Of all the mercies that our Father 
has given, this blessed uncertainty, this long^ 
unbroken silence, may be the dearest. Bitterly 
hard for you and me, but what are thousands 
like you and me weighed against one who 
stands beside a hopeless grave .-* Think a 
minute what mourners there have been, and 
whom they have mourned ! Ponder one such 
solitary instance as that of Vittoria Colonna, 
wondering, through her widowed years, if she 
could ever be 'good enough' to join wicked 
Pescara in another world ! This poor earth 
holds — God only knows how many, God make 
them very few ! — Vittorias. Ah, Mary, what 
right have we to complain ? " 

To-night Aunt Winifred had callers, — Mrs. 
Quirk and (O Homer aristocracy !) the butch- 
er's wife, — - and it fell to my lot to put Faith 
to bed. 



The Gates Ajar. 129 

The little maiden seriously demurred. Cou- 
sin Mary was very good, — O yes, she was good 
enough, — but her mamma was a great deal 
gooder ; and why could n't little peoples sit up 
till nine o'clock as well as big peoples, she 
should like to know ! 

Finally, she came to the gracious conclusion 
tliat perhaps I 'd doy made me carry her all 
the way up stairs, and dropped, like a little 
lump of lead, half asleep, on my shoulder, 
before two buttons were unfastened. 

Feeling under some sort of theological obli- 
gation to hear her say her prayers, I pulled 
her curls a little till she awoke, and went 
through with " Now I lay me down to 
sleep, I pway ve Lord," triumphantly. 1 
supposed that was the end, but it seems that 
she has been also taught the Lord's Prayer, 
which she gave me promptly to understand. 

" O, see here ! That is n't all. I can say 
Our Father, and you Ve got to help me a 
lot!" 

This very soon became a self-evident propo- 
sition ; but by our united efforts we managed, 
after tribulations manifold, to arrive success- 
fully at " For ever 'n' ever 'n' ever 'n' -^-men." 

" Dear me," she said, jumping up with a 
6* I 



130 The Gates Ajar, 

yawn, '* I think that 's a dreadfid long-tailed 
prayeVy — don't you, Cousin Mary ? " 

" Now I must kiss mamma good night," she 
announced, when she was tucked up at last. 

" But mamma kissed you good night before 
you came up." 

" O, so she did. Yes, I 'member. Well, 
it 's papa I 've got to kiss. I knew there was 
somebody." 

I looked at her in perplexity. 

" Why, there ! " she said, " in the upper 
drawer, — my pretty little papa in a purple 
frame. Don't you know ? " 

I went to the bureau-drawer, and found in a 
case of velvet a small ivory painting of her 
father. This I brought, wondering, and the 
child took it reverently and kissed the pictured 
lips. 

" Faith," I said, as I laid it softly back, " do 
you always do this 1 " 

" Do what } Kiss papa good night t O 
yes, I 've done that ever since I was a little 
girl, you know. I guess I 've always kissed 
him pretty much. When I 'm a naughty girl 
he feels real sorry. He 's gone to heaven. I 
like him. O yes, and then, when I 'm through 
kissing, mamma kisses him too." 



The Gates Ajar. 131 



X. 

June ir. 

I was in her room this afternoon while she 
was dressing. I like to watch her brush her 
beautiful gray hair ; it quite alters her face to 
have it down ; it seems to shrine her in like a 
cloud, and the outlines of her cheeks round 
out, and she grows young. 

" I used to be proud of my hair when I was 
a girl," she said with a slight blush, as she saw 
me looking at her ; " it was all I had to be 
vain of, and I made the most of it. Ah well ! 
I was dark-haired three years ago. 

" O you regular old woman ! " she added, 
smiling at herself in the mirror, as she twisted 
the silver coils flashing through her fingers. 
" Well, when I am in heaven, I shall have my 
pretty brown hair again." 

It seemed odd enough to hear that ; then the 
next minute it did not seem odd at all, but the 
most natural thing in the world. 

June 14- 

She said nothing to me about the anniver- 
sary, and, though it has been in my thoughts 



132 The Gates Ajar. 

all the lime, I said nothing to her. I thought 
that she would shut herself up for the day, and 
was rather surprised that she was about as 
usual, busily at work, chatting with me, and 
playing with Faith. Just after tea, she went 
away alone for a time, and came back a little 
quiet, but that was all. I was for some reason 
impressed with the feeling that she kept the 
day in memory, not so much as the day of her 
mourning, as of his release. 

Longing to do something for her, yet not 
knowing what to do, I went into the garden 
while she was away, and, finding some carna- 
tions, that shone like stars in the dying light, I 
gathered them all, and took them to her room, 
and, filling my tiny porphyry vase, left them on 
the bracket, under the photograph of Uncle 
Forceythe that hangs by the window. 

When she found them, she called me, and 
kissed me. 

" Thank you, dear," she said, " and thank 
God too, Mary, for me. That he should have 
been happy, — happy and out of pain, for 
three long beautiful years ! O, think of that ! " 

When I was in her room with the flowers, I 
passed the table on which her little Bible lay 
open. A mark of rich ribbon — a black rib- 



The Gates Ajar, 133 

bon — fell across the pages ; it bore in silver 
text these" words : — ' 

" Thoti shall have no other gods before me^ 

2Ctll. 

" I thank thee, my God, the river of Lethe 
may indeed flow through the Elysian Fields, — 
it does not water the Christian's Paradise." 

Aunt Winifred was saying that over to her- 
self in a dreamy undertone this morning, and 
I happened to hear her. 

" Just a quotation, dear," she said, smiling, 
in answer to my look of inquiry, " I could n't 
originate so pretty a thing. Is lit it pretty .'' " 

" Very ; but I am not sure that I under- 
stand it." 

" You thought that forgetfulness would be 
necessary to happiness ? " 

" Why, — yes ; as far as I had ever thought 
about it ; that is, after our last ties with this 
world are broken. It does not seem to me 
that I could be happy to remember all that I 
have suffered and all that I have sinned here." 

" But the last of all the sins will be as if it 
had never been. Christ takes care of that. 
No shadow of a sense of guilt can dog you, or 
affect your relations to Him or your other 



134 27/^ Gates Ajar. 

friends. The last pain borne, the last tear, 
the last sigh, the last lonely hour, the last 
unsatisfied dream, forever gone by ; ^hy 
should not the dead past bury its dead ? " 

" Then why remember it ? " 

" ' Save but to swell the sense of being 
blest.* Besides, forgetfulness of the disagree- 
able things of this life implies forgetfulness of 
the pleasant ones. They are all tangled to- 
gether." 

" To be sure. I don't know that I should 
like that." 

" Of course you would n't. Imagine your- 
self in a state of being where you and Roy 
had lost your past ; all that you had borne and 
enjoyed, and hoped and feared, together ; the 
pretty little memories of your babyhood, and 
first * half-days' at school, when he used to 
trudge along beside you, — little fellow ! how 
many times I have watched him ! — holding you 
tight by the apron-sleeve or hat-string, or bits 
of fat fingers, lest you should run away or fall. 
Then the old Academy pranks, out of which 
you used to help each other ; his little chival- 
ry and elder-brotherly advice ; the mischief in 
his eyes; some of the * Sunday-night talks'; 
the first novel that you read and dreamed over 



The Gates Ajar, 135 

together ; the college stories ; the chats over 
the corn-popper by firelight ; the earliest, ear- 
nest lookifig-on into life together, its tempta- 
tions conquered, its lessons learned, its disap- 
pointments faced together, — always you two, 
— would you like to, are you likely to, forget 
all this ? 

" Roy might as well be not Roy, but a 
strange angel, if you should. Heaven will be 
not less heaven, but more, for this pleasant 
remembering. So many other and greater 
and hippier memories will fill up the time 
then, that after years these things may — 
probably will — seem smaller than it seems to 
us now they can ever be ; but they will, I 
think, be always dear ; just as we look back to 
our baby-selves with a pitying sort of fondness, 
and, though the little creatures are of small 
enough use to us now, yet we like to keep 
good friends with them for old times' sake. 

" I have no doubt that you and I shall sit 
down some summer afternoon in heaven 'and 
talk over what we have been saying to-day, 
and laugh perhaps at all the poor little dreams 
we have been dreaming of what has not en- 
tered into the heart of man. You see it is 
certain to be so much better than anything 



136 The Gates Ajar, 

that I can think of ; which is the comfort of it 
And Roy — " 

^ Yes ; some more about Roy, please." 

" Supposing he were to come right into the 
room now, — and I slipped out, — and you 
had him all to yourself again — Now, dear, 
don't cry, but wait a minute ! " Her caress- 
ing hand fell on my hair. " I did not mean to 
hurt you, but to say that your first talk with 
him, after you stand face to face, may be like 
that 

" Remembering this life is going to help us 
amazingly, I fancy, to appreciate the next," she 
added, by way of period. "Christ seems to 
have thought so, when he called to the minds 
of those happy people what, in that uncon- 
scious ministering of lowly faith which may 
never reap its sheaf in the field where the seed 
was sown, they had not had the comfort of 
finding out before, — * I was sick and in prison, 
and ye visited me.' And to come again to 
Abraham in the parable, did he not say, * Son, 
remember that thou in thy lifetime hadst good 
things and Lazarus evil ' ? " 

" I wonder what it is, going to look like,** I 
•aid, as soon as I could put poor Dives out of 
my mind. 



The Gates Ajar 137 

" Heaven ? Eye hath not seen, but I have 
my fancies. I think I want some mountains, 
and ver)^ many trees." 

" Mountains and trees ! " 

" Yes ; mountains as we see them at sunset 
and sunrise, or when the maples are on fire 
and there are clouds enough to make great 
purple shadows chase each other into lakes of 
light, over the tops and down the sides, — the 
ideal of mountains which we catch in rare 
glimpses, as we catch the ideal of ever)^thing. 
Trees as they look when the wind cooes 
through them on a June afternoon ; elms or 
lindens or pines as cool as frost, and yellow 
sunshine trickling through on moss. Trees 
in a forest so thick that it shuts out the world, 
and you walk like one in a sanctuar)'. Trees 
pierced by stars, and trees in a bath of sum- 
mer moons to which the thrill of 'Love's 
young dream * shall cling forever — But there 
is no end to one's fancies. Some water, too, 
I would like." 

" There shall be no more sea," 

" Perhaps not ; though, as the sea is the 
great type of separation and of destruction, 
that may be only figurative. But I 'm not 
particular about the sea, if I can have rivers 



ijS The Gates Ajar. 

and little brooks, and fountains of just the 
right sort ; the fountains of this world don't 
please me generally. I want a little brook to 
sit and sing to Faith by. O, I forgot ! she will 
be a large girl probably, won't she t " 

" Never too large to like to.hear your mother 
sing, will you, Faith ? " 

" O no," said Faith, who bobbed in and out 
again like a canary, just then, — "not unless 
I 'm dreadful big, with long dresses and a wa- 
terfall, you know. I s'pose, maybe, I 'd have 
to have little girls myself to sing to, then. 
I hope they '11 behave better 'n Mary Ann does. 
She *s lost her other arm, and all her sawdust 
is just running out. Besides, Kitty thought 
she was a mouse, and ran down cellar with 
her, and she 's all shooken up, somehow. She 
don't look very pretty." 

" Flowers, too," her mother went on, after the 
interruption. " Not all amaranth and asphodel, 
but of variety and color and beauty unim- 
agined ; glorified lilies of the valley, heavenly 
tea-rose buds, and spiritual harebells among 
them. O, how your poor mother used to say, 
— you know flowers were her poetry, — com- 
ing in weak and worn from her garden in the 
early part of her sickness, hands and lap and 



The Gates Ajar, 139 

basket full: 'Winifred, if I only supposed I 
could have some flowers in heaven I shouldn't 
be half so afraid to go ! ' I had not thought 
as much about these things then as J have 
now, or I should have known better how to 
answer her. I should like, if I had my choice, 
to have day-lilies and carnations fresh under 
my windows all the time." 

" Under your windows ? " 

" Yes. I hope to have a home of my own." 

" Not a house .? " . 

" Something not urrlike it. In the Father's 
house are many mansions. Sometimes I fancy 
that those words have a literal meaning which 
the simple men who heard them may have 
understood better than we, and that Christ i? 
truly 'preparing' my home for me. He must 
be there, too, you see, — I mean John." 

I believe that gave me some thoughts that 
I ought not to have, and so I made no reply. 

" Jf we have trees and mountains and flow- 
ers and books," she went on, smiling, " I don't 
see why not have houses as well. Indeed, 
they seem to me as supposable as anything 
can be which is guess-work at the best ; for 
what a homeless, desolate sort of sensation 
it gives one to think of people wandering over 



140 The Gates Ajar, 

the ' sweet fields beyond the flood ' without a 
local habitation and a name. What could be 
done with the millions who, from the time of 
Adam, have been gathering there, unless they 
lived under the conditions of organized society? 
Organized society involves homes, not unlike 
the homes of this world. 

" What other arrangement could be as pleas- 
ant, or could be pleasant at all ? Robertson*s 
definition of a church exactly fits. * More 
united in each other, because more united in 
God.' A happy home is the happiest thing 
in the world. I do not see why it should not 
be in any world. I do not believe that all the 
little tendernesses of family ties are thrown by 
and lost with this life. In fact, Mary, I cannot 
think that anything which has in it the ele- 
ments of permanency is to be lost, but sin. 
Eternity cannot be — it cannot be the great 
blank ocean which most of us have somehow 
or other been brought up to feel that it is, 
which shall swallow up, in a pitiless, glorified 
way, all the little brooks of our delight. So 
I expect to have my beautiful home, and my 
husband, and Faith, as I had them here ; with 
many differences and great ones, but mine 
just the same. Unless Faith goes into a 



The Gates Ajar. 141 

home of her own, — the little creature! I 
suppose she can't always be a baby. 

" Do you remember what a pretty little 
wistful way Charles Lamb has of wondering 
about all this ? 

" * Shall I enjoy friendships there, wanting 
the smiling indications which point me to 
them here, — the " sweet assurance of look" ? 
Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, 
and summer holidays, and the greenness of 
fields, and the delicious juices of meats and 
fish, and society, .... and candle-light and 
fireside conversations, and innocent vanities, 
and jests, and irony itself, — do these things 
go out with life ? ' " 

" Now, Aunt Winifred ! " I said, sitting up 
straight, " what am I to do with these beauti- 
ful heresies ? If Deacon Quirk should h.t^.v\" 

"I do not see where the heresy lies. As I 
hold fast by the Bible, I cannot be in much 
danger." 

"But you don't glean your conjectures from 
the Bible." 

"I conjecture nothing that the B'ble con- 
tradicts. I do not believe as truth indisputa- 
ble anything that the Bible does not give me. 
But I reason from analogy about this, as we 



142 The Gates Ajar, 

all do about other matters. Why shoi :'d we not 
have pretty things in heaven ? If this ' bright 
and beautiful economy ' of, skies and rivers, of 
grass and sunshine, of hills and valleys, is not 
too good for such a place as this world, will 
there be any less variety of the bright and beau- 
tiful in the next ? There is no reason for sup- 
posing that the voice of God will speak to us 
in thunder-claps, or that it will not take to it- 
self, the thousand gentle, suggestive tongues 
of a nature built on the ruins of this, an un- 
marred system of beneficence. 

" There is a pretty argument in the fact 
that just such sunrises,, such opening of buds, 
such fragrant dropping of fruit, such bells, in the 
brooks, such dreams at twilight, and such hush 
of stars, were fit for Adam and Eve, made holy 
man and woman. How do we know that the 
abstract idea of a heaven needs imply anything 
very much unlike Eden ? There is some reason 
as well as poetry in the conception of a ' Para- 
dise Regained.' A 'new earth wherein dwell- 
eth righteousness.' " 

" But how far is it safe to trust to this kind 
of argument ? " 

" Bishop Butler will answer you better than 
I. Let me see, — Isaac Taylor says something 
about that." 



The Gates Ajar. 143 

She went to the bookcase for his " Physical 
Theory of Another Life," and, finding her 
place, showed me this passage : — 

" If this often repeated argument from anal- 
ogy is to be termed, as to the conckisions it 
involves, a. conjecture merely, we ought then 
to abandon altogether every kind of abstract 
reasoning ; nor will it be easy afterwards to 
make good any principle of natural theology. 
In truth, the very basis of reasoning is shaken 
by a scepticism so sweeping as this." 
• And in another place : — 

" None need fear the consequences of such 
endeavors who have well learned the prime 
principle of sound philosophy, namely, not to 
allow the most plausible and pleasing conjec- 
tures to unsettle our convictions of truth .... 
resting upon positive evidence. If there be 
any who frown upon all such attempts, .... 
they would do well to consider, that although 
individually, and from the constitution of their 
minds, they may find it very easy to abstain 
from every path of excursive meditation, it is 
not so with others who almost irresistibly are 
borne forward to the vast field of universal 
contemplation, — a field from which the human 
mind is not to be barred, and which is better 



144 '^^^^ Gates Ajar, 

taken possession of by those who reverently 
bow to the authority of Christianity, than left 
open to impiety." 

" Very good," I said, laying down the book. 
"But about those trees and houses, and the 
rest of your ' pretty things ' ? Are they to be 
like these t " 

" I don't suppose that the houses will be made 
of oak and pine and nailed together, for in- 
stance. But I hope for heavenly types of na- 
ture and of art. Something that will be to us 
then what these are now. Th^-t is the amount 
of it. They may be as * spiritual' as you 
please ; they will answer all the purpose to 
us. As we are not spiritual beings yet, how- 
ever, I am under the necessity of calling them 
by their earthly names. You remember Plato's 
old theory, that the ideal of everything exists 
eternally in the mind of God. If that is so, — 
and I do not see how it can be otherwise, — 
then whatever of God is expressed to us in 
this world by flower, or blade of grass, or 
human face, why should not that be expressed 
forever in heaven by something corresponding 
to flower, or grass, or human face } I do not 
mean that the heavenly creation will be less real 
than these, but more so. Their ' spirituality 



The Gates Ajar. 145 

is of such. a sort that our gardens and forests 
and homes are but shadows of them. 

" You don't know how I amuse myself at 
night thinking this all over before I go to 
£lecp ; wondering what one thing will be like, 
and another thing ; planning what I should 
like ; thinking that John has seen it all, and 
wondering if he is laughing at me because 
I know so little about it ! I tell you, Mary, 
there's a *deal o' comfort in 't/ as Phoebe says 
about her cup of tea." 

July 5. 

Aunt Winifred has been hunting up a Sun- 
day school class for herself and one for me ; 
which is a venture that I never was persuaded 
into undertaking before. She herself is fast 
becoming acquainted with the poorer people 
of the town. 

I find that she is a thoroughly busy Chris-, 
tian, with a certain " week-day holiness " that 
is strong and refreshing, like a west wind. 
Church-going, and conversations on heaven, 
by no means exhaust her vitality. 

She told me a pretty thing about her class ; 

it happened the first Sabbath that she took it. 

Her scholars are young girls of from fourteen 

to eighteen years of age, children of church- 

7 J 



146 The Gates Ajar, 

members, most of them. She seemed to have 
taken their hearts by storm. She says, " They 
treated me very prettily, and made me love 
them at once." 

Clo Bentley is in the class ; Clo is a pretty, 
soft-eyed little creature, with a shrinking mouth, 
and an absorbing passion for music, which she 
has always been too poor to gratify. I suspect 
that her teacher will make a pet of her. Siie 
says that in the course of her lesson, or, m 
her words, — 

" While we were all talking together, som-^- 
body pulled my sleeve, and there was Clo in 
the corner, with her great brown eyes fixed on 
me. * See here ! ' she said in a whisper, ' I 
can't be good! I would be good if I could 
only just have a piano ! ' - * Well, Clo,' I said, 
* if you will be a good girl, and go to heaven, 
I think you will have a piano there, and play 
just as much as you care to.' 

" You ought to have seen the look the child 
gave me ! Delight and fear and incredulous 
bewilderment tumbled over each other, as if 
I had proposed taking her into a forbidden 
fairy-land. 

" ' Why, Mrs. Forceythe ! Why, they won't 
let anybody have a piano up there ! not in 
heaven ? * 



The Gates Ajar. 147 

** I laid down the question-book, and asked 
what kind of place she supposed that heaven 
was going to be. 

" ' O,' she said, with a dreary sigh, * I never 
think about it when I can help it. I suppose 
we sJiali all just stand there ! ' 

" And you ? " I asked of the next, a bright 
girl with snapping eyes. 

" * Do you want me to talk good, or tell the 
truth ? ' she answered me. Having been given 
to understand that she was not expected to 
' talk good ' in my class, she said, with an ap- 
proving, decided nod: *Well, then! I don't 
think it 's going to be anything nice anyway. 
No, I don't 1 I told my last teacher so, and 
she looked just as shocked, and said I never 
should go there as long as I felt so. That 
made me mad, and I told her I did n't see but 
I should be as well off in one place as another, 
except for the fire.' 

" A silent girl in the corner began at this 
point to look interested. ' I always supposed,' 
said she, 'that you just floated round in heaven 
— you know — all together — something like 
ju-jube paste !' 

"Whereupon I shut the question-book en- 
tirely, and took the talking to myself for a while. 



T48 The Gates Ajar. 

" *■ But I never thought it was anything like 
that/ interrupted Httle Clo, presently, her 
cheeks flushed with excitement. *Why, I 
should lik^ to go, if it is like that ! I never 
supposed people talked, unless it was about 
converting people, and saying your prayers, 
and all that.' 

" Now, were n't those ideas * alluring and 
comforting for young girls in the blossom of 
warm human life 1 They were trying with all 
their little hearts to *be good,' too, some of 
them, and had all of them been to church and 
Sunday school all their lives. Never, never, if 
Jesus Christ had been Teacher and Preacher 
to them, would He have pictured their blessed 
endless years with Him in such bleak colors. 
They are not the hues of His Bible.'* 

* Facts. 



TJtfi Gates Ajar, 149 



XI. 

July x6. 

Wc took a trip to-day to East Homer 
for butter. Neither angels nor principalities 
could convince Phoebe that any butter but 
"Stephen David's" might, could, would, or 
should be used in this family. So to Mr. Ste- 
phen David's, a journey of four miles, I meekly 
betake myself at stated periods in the domestic 
year, burdened with directions about firkins 
and half-firkins, pounds and half-pounds, salt 
and no salt, churning and " working-over " ; 
some of which I remember and some of which 
I forget, and to all of which Phoebe considera 
me sublimely incapable of attending. 

The afternoon was perfect, and we took 
things leisurely, letting the reins swing from 
the hook, — an arrangement to which I\Ir. 
Tripp's old gray was e^itirely agreeable, — 
and, leaning back against the buggy-cushions, 
wound along among the strong, sweet pine- 
smells, lazily talking or lazily silent, as the 
spirit moved, and as only two people who 



150 The Gates Ajar, 

thoroughly understand and like each other 
can talk or be silent. 

We rode home by Deacon Quirk's, and, as 
we jogged by, there broke upon our view a 
blooming vision of the Deacon himself, at work 
in his potato-field with his son and heir, who, 
by the way, has the reputation of being the 
most awkward fellow in the township. 

The amiable church-officer, having caught 
sight of us, left his work, and coming up to the 
fence " in rustic modesty unscared," guiltless 
of coat or vest, his calico shirt-sleeves rolled 
up to his huge brown elbows, and his dusty 
straw hat flapping in the wind, rapped on the 
rails with his hoe-handle as a sign for us to 
4top. 

" Are we in a hurry } " I asked, under my 
.•>~eath. 

" O no," said Aunt Winifred. " He has some- 
^ihat to say unto me, I see by his eyes. I 
'>ave been expecting it. Let us hear him out. 
^ood afternoon. Deacon Quirk." 

" Good afternoon, ma'am. Pleasant day } '* 

She assented to the statement, novel as it 
was. 

" A very pleasant day," repeated the Deacon, 
looking for the first time in his life, to my 



The Gates Ajar. 15 1 

knowledge^ a little undecided as to what he 
should say next. "Remarkable fine day for 
riding. In a hurry ? " 

" Well, not especially. Did you want any- 
thing of me ? " 

"You 're a church-member, are n't you, 
ma'am?" asked the Deacon, abruptly. 

"lam." 

" Orthodox .? " 

" O yes," with a smile. " You had a reason 
for asking } " 

" Yes, ma'am ; I had, as you might say, a 
reason for asking." 

The Deacon laid his hoe on the top of the 
fence, and his arms across it, and pushed his 
hat on the back of his head in a becoming 
and argumentative manner. 

" r hope you don't consider that I 'm taking 
liberties if I have a little religious conversa- 
tion with you, Mrs. Forceythe." 

"It is no offence to me if you are," replied 
Mrs. Forceythe, with a twinkle in her eye ; 
but both twinkle and words glanced off from 
the Deacon. 

" My wife was telling me last night," he be- 
gan, with an ominous cough, " that her niece, 
Clotildy Bentley — Moses Bentley's daughter, 



152 The Gates Ajar. 

you know, and one of your sentimental giils 
that reads poetry, and is easy enough led away 
by vain delusions and false doctrine — was 
under your charge at Sunday school. Nov? 
Clotildy is intimate with my wife, — who is he*- 
aunt on her mother's side, and always tries t( 
do her duty by her, — and she told Mrs. Quiil 
what you 'd been a saying to those young 
minds on the Sabbath." 

He stopped, and observed her impressively, 
as if he expected to see the guilty blushes of 
arraigned heresy covering her amused, atten- 
tive face. 

" I hope you will pardon me, ma 'am, for 
repeating it, but Clotildy said that you told 
her she should have a pianna in heaven. A 
piajma, ma 'am ! " 

"I certainly .did," she said quietly. 

" You did 1 Well, now, I did n't believe it, 
nor I would n't believe it, till I 'd asked you ! 
I thought it warn't more than fair that I 
should ask you, before repeating it, you know. 
It 's none of my business, Mrs. Forceythe, any 
more than that I take a general interest in the 
spiritooal welfare of the youth of our Sabbat,h 
school ; but I am very much surprised ! I am 
very much surprised I '* 



The Gates Ajar. 153 

" r am surprised that you should be, Deacon 
Quirk. Do you believe that God would take 
a poor little disappointed girl like Clo, who 
has been all her life here forbidden the enjoy- 
ment of a perfectly innocent taste, and keep 
her in His happy heaven eternal years, with- 
out finding means to gratify it ? I don't." 

" I tell Clotildy I don't see what she 
wants of a pianna-forte," observed " Clo- 
tildy's " uncle, sententiously. " She can go 
to singin' school, and she 's been in the 
choir ever since I have, which is six years 
come Christmas. Besides, I don't think 
it *s our place to speckylate on the mys- 
teries of the heavenly spere. My wife told 
her that she must n't believe any such things 
as that, which were very irreverent, and con- 
trary to the Scriptures, and Clo went home 
crying. She said : * It was so pretty to think 
about.' It is very easy to impress these 
delusions of fancy on the young." 

" Pray, Deacon Quirk," said Aunt Winifred, 
leaning earnestly forward in the carriage, " will 
you tell me what there is * irreverent ' or ' un- 
scriptural ' in the idea that there will be Instru- 
mental music in heaven } " 

" Well," replied the Deacon after some 



154 ^/^^ Gates Ajar. 

consideration, " come to think of it, there will 
be harps, I suppose. Harpers harping with 
their harps on the sea of glass. But I don't 
believe there will be any piannas. It's a 
dreadfully material way to talk -about that 
glorious world, to my thinking." 

'' If you could show me wherein a harp is 
less ' material ' than a piano, perhaps I should 
agree with you." 

Deacon Quirk looked rather nonplussed for 
a minute. 

"What do you suppose people will do in 
heaven ? " she asked again. 

"Glorify God," said the Deacon, promptly 
recovering himself, — " glorify God, and sing 
Worthy the Lamb ! We shall be clothed in 
white robes with palms in our hands, and bow 
before the Great White Throne. We shall be 
engaged in such employments as befit sinless 
creatures in a spiritooal state of existence." 

" Now, Deacon Quirk," replied Aunt Wini- 
fred, looking him over from head to foot, — old 
straw hat, calico shirt, blue overalls, and cow- 
hide boots, coarse, work-worn hands, and 
"narrow forehead braided tight," — "just im- 
agine yourself, will you ? taken out of this life 
this minute, as you stand here in your potato* 



71ie Gates Ajar. 155 

field (the Deacon changed his position with 
evident uneasiness), and put into another life, 
— not anybody else, but yourself, just as you 
left this spot, — and do you honestly think that 
you should be happy to go and put on a white 
dress and stand still in a choir with a green 
branch in one hand and a singing-book in the 
other, and sing and pray and never do any- 
thing but sing and pray, this year, next year, 
and every year forever ? " 

"We-ell," he replied, surprised into a mo- 
mentary flash of carnal candor, " I can't say 
that I should n't wonder for a minute, maybe, 
how Abiiiadab would ever get those potatoes hoed 
without vie. — Abinadab ! go back to your 
work!" 

The graceful Abinadab had sauntered up 
during the conversation, and was listening, 
hoe in hand and mouth open. He slunk away 
when his father spoke, but came up again 
presently on tiptoe when Aunt Winifred was 
talking. There was an interested, intelligent 
look about his square and pitifully embar- 
rassed face, which attracted my notice. 

"But then," proceeded the Deacon, re-en- 
forced by the sudden recollection of his duties 
as a father and a church-member, "that 



156 The Gates Ajar, 

could n't be a permanent state of feeling, you 
know. I expect to be transformed by the 
renewing of my mind to appreciate the glories 
of the New Jerusalem, descending out of heav- 
en from God. That 's what I expect, marm. 
Now I heerd that you told Mrs. Bland, or that 
Mary told her, or that she heerd it someway, 
that you said you supposed there were trees 
and flowers and houses and such in heaven. 
I told my wife I thought your deceased hus- 
band was a Congregational minister, and I 
did n't believe you ever said it ; but that 's the 
rumor." 

Without deeming it necessary to refer to 
her " deceased husband," Aunt Winifred re- 
plied that "rumor" was quite right. 

" Well ! " said the Deacon, with severe sig- 
nificance, " / believe in a spiritooal heaven." 

I looked him over again, — hat, hoe, shirt, 
and all ; scanned his obstinate old face with its 
stupid, good eyes and animal mouth. Then I 
glanced at Aunt Winifred as she leaned 
forward in the afternoon light ; the white, 
finely cut woman, with her serene smile and 
rapt, saintly eyes, — every inch of her, body 
and soul, refined not only by birth and train- 
ing, but by the long nearness of her heart to 
Christ 



Ihe Gates Ajar, 157 

* Of the earth, earthy. Of the heavens, 
heavenly." The two faces sharpened them- 
selves into two types. Which, indeed, was 
the better able to comprehend a " spiritooal 
heaven " } 

" It is distinctly stated in the Bible, by 
which I suppose we shall both agree," said 
Aunt Winifred, gently, " that there shall be a 
nrd) earthy as well as new heavens. It is no- 
ticeable, also, that the descriptions of heaven, 
although a series of metaphors, are yet singu- 
larly earth like and tangible ones. Are fiov/- 
-ers and skies and trees less 'spiritual' than 
white dresses and little palm-branches } In 
fact, where are you going to get your little 
branches without trees ? What could well be 
more suggestive of material modes of living, 
and material industry, than a city marked into 
streets and alleys, paved solidly with gold, 
walled in and barred with gates whose jewels 
are named and counted, and whose very length 
and breadth are measured with a celestial 
surveyor's chain ? " 

"But I think we'd ought to stick to what 
the Bible says," answered the Deacon, stolidly. 
" If it says golden cities and does n't say 
flowers, it means cities and does n't mean 



158 The Gates Ajar, 

flowers. I dare say you 're a good woman, 
Mrs. Forceythe, if you do hold such oncommon 
doctrine, and I don't doubt you mean well 
enough, but I don't think that we ought to 
trouble ourselves about these mysteries of a 
future state, /'m willing to trust them to 
God ! " 

The evasion of a fair argument by this self- 
sufficient spasm of piety was more than I 
could calmly stand, and I indulged in a sub- 
dued explosion. — Auntie says it sounded like 
Fourth of July crackers touched off under a 
wet barrel. 

" Deacon Quirk ! do you mean to imply 
that Mrs. Forceythe does not trust it to God } 
The truth is, that the existence of such a world 
as heaven is a fact from which you shrink. 
You know you do ! She has twenty thoughts 
about it where you have one ; yet you set up 
a claim to superior spirituality ! " 

" Mary, Mary, you are a little excited; I fear. 
God is a spirit, and they that worship him 
must worship him in spirit and in truth ! " 

The relevancy of this last, I confess myself 
incapable of perceiving, but the good man 
seemed to be convinced that he had made a 
point, and we rode off leaving him under that 
blissful delusion. 



The Gates Ajar, 159 

" If he were lit a good man ! '* I sighed. 
'* But he is, and I must respect him for it." 

" Of course you must ; nor is he to blame 
that he is narrow and rough. I should scarce- 
ly have argued as seriously as I did with hira, 
but that, as I fancy him to be a representative 
of a class, I wanted to try an experiment. 
Is n*t he amusing, though ? He is precisely 
one of Mr. Stopford Brooke's men 'who can 
understand nothing which is original.' " 

" Are there, or are there not, more of such 
men in our church than in others } " 

" Not more * proportionately to numbers. 
But I would not have them thinned out. The 
better we do Christ's work, the more of un- 
educated, neglected, or deoased mind will be 
drawn to try and serve Him with us. He 
sought out the lame, the halt, the blind, the 
stupid, the crotchety, the rough, as well as the 
equable, the intelligent, the refined. Un- 
trained Christians in any sect will always have 
their eccentricities and their littlenesses, at. 
which the silken judgment of high places, 
where the Carpenter's Son would be a strange 
guest, will sneer. That never troubles me. It 
only raises the question in my mind whether 
cultivated Christians generally are sufficiently 



i6o The Gates Ajar. 

ailtivatorSy scattering their golden gifts on 
wayside ground." 

"Now take Deacon Quirk," I suggested, 
when we had ridden along a little way under 
the low, green arches of the elms, "and put 
him into heaven as you proposed, just as he is, 
and what is he going to do with himself ? He 
can dig potatoes and sell them without cheat- 
ing, and give generously of their proceeds to 
foreign missions ; but take away his potatoes, 
and what would become of him ? I don't 
know a human being more incapacitated to 
live in such a heaven as he believes in." 

"Very true, and a good, common-sense 
argument against such a heaven. I don't 
profess to surmise what will be found for hira 
to do, beyond this, — that it will be some very 
palpable work that he can understand. How 
do we know that he would not be appointed 
guardian of his poor son here, to whom I sus- 
pect he has not been all that father might be in 
Jthis life, and that he would not have his body 
as well as his soul to look after, his farm as 
well as his prayers .? to him might be commit- 
ted the charge of the dews and the rains and 
the hundred unseen influences that are at 
work oi> thip very potato-field." 



The Gates Ajar. i6i 

** But when his son has gone in his turn, 
and we have all gone, and there are no more 
potato-fields ? An Eternity remains." 

" You don't know that there would n*t be 
any potato-fields ; there may be some kind of 
agricultural employments even then. To 
whomsoever a talent is given, it will be given 
him wherewith to use it. Besides, by that 
time the good Deacon will be immensely 
changed. I suppose that the simple transition 
of death, which rids him of sin and of grossness, 
will not only wonderfully refine him, but will 
have its effect upon his intellect." 

" If a talent is given, use will be found for it ) 
Tell me some more about that." 

" I fancy many things about it ; but of 
course can feel sure of only the foundation 
principle. This life is a great school-house. 
The wise Teacher trains in us such gifts as, if 
we graduate honorably, will be of most service 
in the perfect manhood and womanhood that 
come after. He sees, as we do not, that a 
power is sometimes best trained by repression. 
* We do not always lose an advantage when 
we dispense with it,' Goethe says. But the 
sufiTocated lives, like little Clo's there, make 
my heart ache sometimes. I take comfort in 

K 



i62 . The Gates Ajar. 

thinking how they will bud and blossom up in 
the air, by and by. There are a great many 
of them. We tread them underfoot in our 
careless stepping now and then, and do not see 
that they have not the elasticity to rise from 
our touch. * Heaven may be a place for those 
who failed on earth,* the Country Parson 
says." 

" Then there will be air enough for all } " 
"For all; for those who have had a little, 
bloom in this world, as well. I suppose the 
artist will paint his pictures, the poet sing his 
happy songs, the orator and author v/ill not fina 
their talents hidden in the eternal darkness of 
a grave ; the sculptor will use his beautiful gift 
in the moulding of some heavenly Carrara ; * as 
well the singer as the player on instruments 
shall be there.' Christ said a thing that has 
grown on me with new meanings lately: — -*He 
that Joseth his life for my sake shall find it! 
It, you see, — not another man's life, not a 
strange compound of powers and pleasures, 
but his own familiar aspirations. So we shall 
best 'glorify God,' not- less there than here, by 
doing it in the peculiar way that He himself 
marked out for us. But — ah, Mary, you see 
It is only the life * lost ' for His sake that shaD 



The Gates Ajar. 163 

be so beautifully found. A great man never 
goes to heaven because he is great. He must 
go, as the meanest of his fellow-sinners go, 
with face towards Calvary, and every golden 
treasure used for love of Him who showed him 
how." 

"What would the old Pagans — and mod- 
ern ones, too, for that matter — say to that? 
Was n't it Tacitus who announced it as his 
belief, that immortality was granted as a spe- 
cial gift to a few superior minds } For the 
people who persisted in making up the rest of 
the world, poor things ! as it could be of little 
consequence what became of them, they might 
die as the brute dieth." 

" It seems an unbearable thing to me some- 
times," she went on, " the wreck of a gifted 
soul. A man who can be, if he chooses, as 
much better and happier than the rest of us 
as the ocean reflects more sky than a mill- 
pond, must also be, if he chooses, more wicked 
and more miserable. It takes longer to leach 
sea-shells than river-pebbles. I am compelled 
to think, also, that intellectual rank must in 
heaven bi^ar some proportion to " goodness. 
There are last and there are first that shall 
have changed places. As the tree falleth, 



i64 The Gates Ajar, 

there shall it lie, and with that amount of 
holiness of which a man leaves this life the 
possessor, he must start in another. I have 
seen great thinkers, * foremost men' in science, 
in theology, in the arts, who, I solemnly 
believe, will turn aside in heaven, — and will 
turn humbly and heartily, — to let certain day- 
laborers and paupers whom I have known go 
up before them as kings and priests unto 
God." 

" I believe that. But I was going to ask, — 
for poor creatures like your respected niece, 
who has n't a talent, nor even a single absorb- 
ing taste, for one thing above another thing, 
— what shall she do }'' 

" Whatever she liketh best ; something very 
useful, my dear, don't be afraid, and very 
pleasant. Something, too, for which this life 
has fitted you ; though you may not understand 
how that can be, better than did poor Heine 
on his ' matrazzen-gruft,' reading all the books 
that treated of his disease. 'But what good 
this reading is to do me I don't know,' he said, 
* except that it will qualify me to give lectures 
in heaven on the ignorance of doctors on earth 
•ibout diseases of the spinal marrow.' " 

" I don't know how many times I have 



The Gates Ajar. 165 

Ihoiiglit of — I believe it was the poet Gray, 
who said that his idea of heaven was to lie on 
the sofa and read novels. That touches the 
lazy part of us, though." 

"Yes, they will be the active, outgoing, 
generous elements of our nature that will be 
brought into use then, rather than the self- 
centred and dreamy ones. Though I suppose 
that we shall read in heaven, — being influenced 
to be better and nobler by good and noble 
teachers of the pen, not less there than here." 

"O think of it ! To have books, and music, 
— and pictures t " 

"All that Art, 'the handmaid of the Lord/ 
can do for us, I have no doubt will be done. 
Eternity will never become monotonous. Va- 
riety without end, charms unnumbered with- 
in charms, will be devised by Infinite inge- 
nuity to minister to our delight. Perhaps, — 
this is just my fancying, — perhaps there will 
be whole planets turned into galleries of art, 
over which we may wander at will ; or into 
orchestral halls where the highest possibilities 
of music will be realized to singer and to 
hearer. Do you know, I have sometimes had 
a flitting notion that music would be the 
language of heaven } It certainly differs in 



1 66 The Gates Ajar, 

some indescribable manner from the other arta 
We have most of us felt it in our different ways. 
It always seems to me like the cry of a great, 
sad life dragged to use in this world against it3 
will. Pictures and statues and poems fit them- 
selves to their work more contentedly. Sym- 
phony and song struggle in fetters. That 
sense of conflict is not good for me. It is 
quite as likely to harm as to help. Then 
perhaps the mysteries of sidereal systems will 
be spread out like a child's map before us. 
Perhaps we shall take journeys to Jupiter and 
to Saturn and to the glittering haze of nebulae, 
and to the site of ruined worlds whose ' extinct 
light is yet travelling through space.* Occupa- 
tion for explorers there, you see ! " 

" You make me say with little Clo, ' O, why, 
I want to go ! ' every time I hear you talk. 
But there is one thing, — you spoke of families 
living together." 

" Yes." 
And you spoke of — your husband. But 
the Bible — " 

" Says there shall be no marrying nor giving 
in marriage. I know that. Nor will there be 
such marrying or giving in marriage as there 
is in a world like this. Christ expressly goes 



The Gates Ajar. 167 

on to state, that we shall be as the angels in 
heaven. How do we know what heavenly 
unions of heart with heart exist among the 
angels ? It leaves me margin enough to live 
and be happy with John forever, and it holds 
many possibilities for the settlement of all 
perplexing questions brought about by the 
relations of this world. It is of no use to talk 
much about them. But it is on that very verse 
that I found my unshaken belief that they will 
be smoothed out in some natural and happy 
way, with which each one shall be content." 

" But O, there is a great gulf fixed ; and on 
one side one, and on the other another, and 
they loved each other," 

Her face paled, — it always pales, I notice, 
at the mention of this mystery, — but her eyes 
never lost by a shade their steadfast trust. 

" Mary, don't question me about that. That 
belongs to the unutterable things. God will 
take care of it. I think I could leave it to hiai 
even if he brought it for me myself to face. I 
feel sure that he will make it all come out 
right. Perhaps He will be so dear to us, that 
we could not love any one who hated him. In 
some way the void imist be filled, for he shall 
wipe away tears. But it seems to me that the 



1 68 The Gates Ajar. 

only thought in which there can be any resty 
and in that there caiiy is this": that Christ, who 
loves us even as his Father loves him, can be 
happy in spite of the existence of a hell. If 
it is possible to him, surely he can make it 
possible to us." 

"Two things that He has taught us," she 
said after a silence, "give me beautiful assur- 
ance that none of these dreams with which I 
help myself can be beyond his intention to 
fulfil. One is, that eye hath not seen it, nor 
ear heard it, nor the heart conceived it, — this 
lavishness of reward which he is keeping for 
us. Another is, that ' I shall be satisfied 
when I awake.'" 

"With his likeness." 

"With his likeness. And about that I 
have other things to say." 

But Old Gray stopped at the gate and 
Phoebe was watching for her butter, and it wai» 
no time to say them then. 



The Gates Ajar, 169 



XII. 

July 22, 

Aunt Winifred has connected herself with 
our church. I think it was rather hard for 
her, breaking the last tie that bound her to her 
husband's people ; but she had a feeling, that, 
if her work is to be done and her days ended 
here, she had better take up all such little 
threads of influence to make herself one with 
us. 

25th. 

To-day what should Deacon Quirk do but 
.make a solemn call on Mrs. Forceythe, for the 
purpose of asking — and this with a hint that 
he wished he had asked before she became a 
member of the Homer First Congregational 
Church — whether there were truth in the 
rumors, now rife about town, that she was a 
Sv/edenborgian ! 

Aunt Winifred broke out laughing, and 
laughed merrily. The Deacon frowned. 

" I used to fancy that I believed in Sweden- 



I/O The Gates Ajar, 

borg/' she said, as soon as she could sobei 
down a little. 

The Deacon pricked up his ears, with \'is« 
ions of excommunications and councils reflect 
cd on every feature. 

" Until I read his books," she finished. 

" Oh ! " said the Deacon. He waited foi 
more, but she seemed to consider the conversa- 
tion at an end. 

"So then you — if I understand — are not 
a Swedenborgian, ma'am ? " 

" If I were, I certainly should have had no 
inducement to join myself to your church," she 
replied, with gentle dignity. " I believe, with 
all my heart, in the same Bible and the same 
creed that you believe in. Deacon Quirk." 

"And you live your creed, which all such 
genial Christians do not find it necessary to 
do," I thought, as the Deacon in some perplex- 
ity took his departure, and she returned with a 
smile to her sewing. 

I suppose the call came about in this way. 
We had the sewing-circle here last week, and 
just before the lamps were lighted, and when 
people had dropped their work to group and 
talk in the corners, Meta Tripp came up with 
one or two other girls to Aunt Winifred, and 



lite Gates Ajar, 171 

begged " to hear some of those queer things 
people said she believed about heaven." Aun- 
tie is never obtrusive with her views on this or 
any other matter, but, being thus urged, she 
answered a few questions that they put to her, 
to the extreme scandal of one or two old ladies, 
and the secret delight of the rest. 

" Well," said little Mrs. Bland, squeezing 
and kissing her youngest, who was at that 
moment vigorously employed in sticking very 
long darning-needles into his mother's water- 
fall, " I hope there 'U be a great many babies 
there. I should be perfectly happy if I always 
could have babies to play with ! " 

The look that Aunt Winifred shot over at 
me was worth seeing. 

She merely replied, however, that she sup- 
posed all our " highest aspirations," — with an 
indescribable accent to which Mrs. Bland was 
safely deaf, — if good ones, would be realized ; 
and added, laughing, that Swedenborg said 
that the babies in heaven — who outnumber 
the grown people — will be given into the 
charge of those "women especially fond of 
them. 

" Swedenborg is suggestive, even if you can't 
accept what seem to the uninitiated to be his 



1/2 The Gates Ajar. 

natural impossibilities," she said, after we had 
discussed Deacon Quirk awhile. " He says a 
pretly thing, too, occasionally. Did I ever 
read you about the houses ? " 

She had not, and I wished to hear, so she 
found the book on Heaven and Hell, and 
read : — 

"As often as I have spoken with the angela 
mouth to mouth, so often I have been with 
them in their habitations : their habitations 
are altogether like the habitations on- earth 
which are called houses, but more beautiful ; 
in them are parlors, rooms, and chambers in 
great numbers ; there are also courts, and 
round about are gardens, shrubberies, and 
fields. Palaces of heaven have been seen, 
which were so magnificent that they could not 
be described ; above, they glittered as if they 
were of pure gold, and below, as if they were 
of precious stones; one palace was more splen- 
did than another ; within, it was the same the 
rooms were ornamented with such decorations 
as neither words nor sciences are sufficient to 
describe. On the side which looked to the 
south there were paradises, where all things in 
like manner glittered, and in some places 
the leaves were as of silver, and the fruits 



The Gates Ajar. 173 

as of gold ; and the flowers on their beds pre- 
sented by colors as it were rainbows ; at the 
boundaries again were palaces, in which the 
view terminated." 

Aunt Winifred says that our hymns, taken 
all together, contain the worst and the best 
pictures of heaven that we have in any branch 
)f literature. 

" It seems to me incredible," she says, " that 
the Christian Church should have allowed that 
beautiful 'Jerusalem' in its hymnology so long, 
with the ghastly couplet, — 

* Where congregations ne'er break up, 
And Sabbaths have no end.' 

The dullest preachers are sure to give it 
out, and that when there are the greatest 
number of restless children wondering when it 
will be time to go home. Y is only within 
ten years that modern hymn books have al- 
tered it, returning in part to the original. 

" I do not think we have chosen the best 
parts of that hymn for our * service of song.' 
You never read the whole of it } You don't 
know how pretty it is ! It is a relief from the 
customary palms and choirs. One's whole heart 
is glad of the outlet of its sweet refrain, — 
' Would God that I were there 1 ' 



1/4 ^^^^ Gates Ajar. 

before one has half read it. You arc quite 
ready to believe that 

* There is no hunger, heat, nor cold. 

But pleasure every way? 

Listen to this : — 

* Thy houses are of ivory, 

Thy windows crystal clear, 
Thy tiles are made of beaten gold ; 
O God, that I were there 1 

* We that are here in banishment 

Continually do moan. 

• • • • » 

* Our sweet is mixed with bitter gall, 

Our pleasure is but pain, 
Our joys scarce last the looking on, 
Our sorrows still remain. 

* B'lt there they live in such delight, 

Stick pleasure and such play^ 
As that to them a thousand years 
Doth seem as yesterday.' 

And this : — 

* Thy fjardens and thy gallant walks 

Continually are green ; 
There grow such sweet and pleasant fiovircra 
As nowhere else are seen. 

* There cinnamon, there sugar grows, 

There nard and balm abound, 
What tongue can tell, or heart conceive 
The joys that there are found ? 



The Gates Ajar. •175 

* Quite through the streets, with silver sound, 
The flood of life doth flow, 
Upon whose banks, on every side, 
The wood of life doth grow.' 

I tell you we may learn something from 
that grand old Catholic singer. He is far 
nearer to the Bible than the innovators on 
his MSS. Do you not notice how like his 
images are to the inspired ones, and yet how 
pleasant and natural is the efifect of the entire 
poem ? 

" There is nobody like Bonar, though, to sing 
about heaven. There is one of his, * We shall 
meet and rest,' — do you know it t " 

I shook my head, and knelt down beside her 
and watched her face, — it was quite uncon- 
scious of me, the musing face, — while she 
repeated dreamily : — 

" Where the faded flower shall freshen, — 

Freshen nevermore to fade ; 
Where the shaded sky shall brighten, — 

Brighten nevermore to shade ; 
Where the sun-blaze never scorches ; 

Where the star-beams cease to chill ; 
Where no tempest stirs the echoes 

Of the wood, or wave, or hill ; . . . . 
Where no shadow shall bewilder ; 

Where life's vain parade is o'er ; 
Where the sleep of sin is broken. 

And the dreamer dreams no more ; 



1^6 The Gates Ajar. 

Where the bond is never severed, — 

Partings, claspings, sob and moan. 
Midnight waking, twilight weeping, 

Heavy noontide, — all are done ; 
Where the child has found its mother ; 

Where the mother finds the child ; 
Where dear families are gathered, 

That were scattered on the wild ; . . • • 
Where the hidden wound is healed ; 

Where the blighted life reblooms ; 
Where the smitten heart the freshness 

Of its buoyant youth resumes ; . . . . 
Where we find the joy of loving, 

As we never loved before, — 
Loving on, unchilled, unhinde- "d. 

Loving once, forevennore." , . • 

3cth. 

Aunt Winifred was weeding her day-lilies 
this morning, when the gate creaked timidly, 
and then swung noisily, and in walked Abina- 
dab Quirk, with a bouquet of China pinks in the 
button-hole of his green-gray linen coat. He 
had taken evident pains to smarten himself up 
a little, for his hair was combed into two hori- 
zontal dabs over his ears, and the green-gray 
coat and blue-checked shirt-sleeves were quite 
clean ; but he certainly is the most uncouth 
specimen of six feet five that it has ever been 
my privilege to behold. I feel sorry for him, 
though. I heard Meta Tripp laughing at hira 



The Gates Ajar, 177 

in Sunday school the other day, — " Quad- 
rangular Quirk," she called him, a little too 
loud, and the poor fellow heard her. He half 
turned, blushing fiercely ; then slunk down in 
his corner with as pitiable a look as is often 
seen upon a man's face. » 

He came up to Auntie awkwardly, — a part 
of the scene I saw from the window, and the 
rest she told me, — head hanging, and the tiny 
bouquet held out. 

" Clo sent these to you," he stammered out, 
— - " my cousin Clo. I was coming 'long, and 
she thought, you know, — she'd get me, you 
see, to — to — that is, to — bring them. She 
sent her — that is — let me see. She sent her 
respect — ful — respectful — no, her love ; that 
was it. She sent her love 'long with 'em." 

Mrs. Forceythe dropped her weeds, and held 
out her white, shapely hands, wet with the 
heavy dew, to take the flowers. 

" O, thank you ! Clo knows my fancy for 
pinks. How kind in you to bring them ! 
Won't you sit down a few moments t I was 
just going to rest a little. Do you like flowers V* 

Abinadab eyed the white hands, as his huge 
fingers just touched them, with a sort of awe ; 
and, sighing, sat down on the ^^r^^ edge of the 
8* L 



178 The Gates Ajar. 

garden bench beside her. After a singular 
variety of efforts to take the most uncomforta- 
ble position of which he was capable, he suc- 
ceeded to his satisfaction, and, growing then 
somewhat more at his ease, answered her 
question. 

" Flowers are sech gassy things. They just 
blow out and that's the end of 'em. / like 
machine-shops best." 

" Ah ! well, that is a very useful liking. Do 
you ever invent machinery yourself } " 

" Sometimes," said Abinadab, with a bashful 
smile. " There 's a little improvement of mine 
for carpet-sweepers up before the patent-office 
now. Don't know whether they '11 run it 
through. Some of the chaps I saw in Boston 
told me they thought they would do 't in time ; 
it takes .an awful sight of time. I 'm alwers 
fussing over something of the kind ; alwers 
did, sence I was a baby ; had my little wind* 
mills and carts and things ; used to sell 'em to- 
the other young uns. Father don't like it. 
He wants me to stick to the farm. I don't 
like farming. I feel like a fish out of water. 
— Mrs. Forceythe, marm ! " 

He turned on her with an abrupt change of 
tone, so funny that she could with difficulty 
retain her gravity. 



The Gates Ajar, lyg 

** I heard you saying a sight of queer things 
the other day about heaven. Clo, she 's been 
telling me a sight more. Now, / never 
believed in heaven ! " 

" Why ? " 

" Because I don't believe," said the poor fel- 
low, with sullen decision, "that a benevolent 
God ever would ha' made sech a derned awk- 
ward chap as I am ! " 

Aunt Winifred replied by stepping into the 
house, and bringing out a fine photograph of 
one of the best of the St. Georges, — a rapt, yet 
very manly face, in which the saint and the 
hero are wonderfully blended. 

" I suppose," she said, putting it into his 
hands, " that if you should go to heaven, you 
would be as much fairer than that picture as 
that picture is fairer than you are now." 

" No ! Why, would I, though ? Jim-miny ! 
Why, it would be worth going for, would n't 
it .? " 

The words were no less reverently spoken 
than the vague rhapsodies of his father ; for 
the sullenness left his face, and his eyes — 
which are pleasant, and not unmanly, when 
one fairly sees them — sparkled softly, like a 
child's. 



l8o The Gates Ajar, 

" ^Take it all up there, maybe ? " musing, 
— " <-he gills laughing at you all your life, and 
all ? That would be the bigger heft of the two 
then, would n't it ? for they say there ain't any 
end to things up there. Why, so it might be 
fair in Him after all ; more 'n fair, perhaps. 
See here, Mrs. Forceythe, I 'm not a church- 
m.ember, you know, and father, he 's dreadful 
troubled about me ; prays over me like a span 
of ministers, the old gentleman does, every 
Sunday night. Now, I don't want to go to 
the other place any more than the next man, 
and I 've had my timeS, too, of thinking I *d 
keep steady and say my prayers reg'lar, — it 
makes a chap feel on a sight better terms with 
himself, — but I don't see how / 'm going to 
wear white frocks and stand up in a choir, — 
never could sing no more 'n a frog with a cold 
in his head, — it tires me more now, honest, to 
think of it, than it does to do a week's mowing. 
Look at me ! Do you s'pose I 'm fit for it } 
Father, he 's always talking about the thrones, 
and the wings, and the praises, and the palms, 
and having new names in your foreheads, 
(should n't object to that, though, by any 
means), till he drives me into the tool-house, 
or off on a spree. I tell him if God hain't got 



The Gates Ajar. i8l 

a place where chaps like me can do something 
He 's fitted 'em to do in this world, there 's no 
use thinking about it anyhow." 

So Auntie took the honest fellow into her 
most earnest thought for half an hour, and 
argued, and suggested, and reproved, and 
helped him, as only she could do ; and at the 
end of it seemed to have worked into his mind 
some distinct and not unwelcome ideas of 
what a Christ-like life must mean to him, and 
of the cominsf heaven which is so much more 
real to her than any life outside of it. 

" And then," she told him, " I imagine that 
your fancy for machinery will be employed in 
some way. Perhaps you will do a great deal 
more successful inventing there than you ever 
will here." 

" You don't say so ! " said radiant Abina- 
dab. 

" God will give you something to do, certain- 
ly, and something that you will like." 

"I might turn it to some religious purpose, 
you know ! " said Abinadab, looking bright 
" Perhaps I could help 'em bufld a church, or 
hist some of their pearl gates, or something 
like ! " 

Upon that he said that it was time to be at 



1 82 The Gates Ajar, 

home and see to the oxen, and shambled awk 
wardly away. 

Clo told us this afternoon that he begged the 
errand and the flowers from her. She says: 
'* 'Bin thinks there never was anybody like you, 
Mrs. Forceythe, and 'Bin is n't the only one, 
either." At which Mrs. Forceythe smiles 
absently, thinking — I wonder of what. 

Monday night. 

I saw as funny and as pretty a bit of a 
diama this afternoon as I have seen for a long 
time. 

Faith had been rolling out in the hot hay 
ever since three o'clock, with one of the little 
Blands, and when the shadows grew long they 
came in with flushed cheeks and tumbled hair, 
to rest and cool upon the door-steps. I was 
sitting in the parlor, sewing energetically on 
some sun-bonnets for some of Aunt Winifred's 
people down town, — I found the heat to be 
more bearable if I kept busy, — and could see, 
unseen, all the little tableaux into which the 
two children grouped themselves ; a new one 
every instant ; in the shadow now, — now in a 
quiver of golden glow ; the wind tossing. their 
hair about, and their chatter chiming down the 
hall like bells. 



The Gates Ajar. 183 

" O what a funny little sunset there 's going 
to be behind the maple-tree," said the blond- 
haired Bland, in a pause. 

" Funny enough," observed Faith, -with her 
superior smile^ " but it 's going to be a great 
deal funnier up in heaven, I tell you, Molly 
Bland." 

" Funny in heaven } Why, Faith ! " Molly 
drew herself up with a religious air, and looked 
the image of her father. 

" Yes, to be sure. I 'm going to have some 
little pink blocks made out of it when I go ; 
pink and yellow and green and purple and — 
O, so many blocks ! I 'm going to have a little 
red cloud to sail round in, like that one up 
over the house, too, I should n't wonder." 

Molly opened her eyes. 

" O, I don't believe it ! " 

" You don't know much ! " said Miss Faith, 
superbly. " I should n't s'pose you wauld be- 
lieve it. P'r'aps I'll have some strawberries 
too, and some ginger-snaps, — I 'm not going 
to have any old bread and butter up there, — 
O, and some little gold apples, and a lot of 
playthings ; nicer playthings — why, nicer 
than, they have in the shops in Boston, Molly 
Bland! God's keeping 'em up there a pur- 
pose." 



184 1^^^^ Gates Ajar. 

" Dear me ! " said incredulous Molly, " I 
should just like to know who told you that 
much. My mother never told it at me. Did 
your mother tell it at you ? " 

" O, she told me some of it, and the rest I 
thinked out myself." 

" Let 's go and play One Old Cat," said 
Molly, with an uncomfortable jump ; " I wish 
I had n't got to go to heaven ! " 

" Why, Molly Bland ! why, I think heaven *s 
splendid ! I Ve got my papa up there, you 
know. * Here 's my little girl ! ' That *s what 
he 's going to say. Mamma, she '11 be there, 
too, and we 're all going to live in the prettiest 
house. I have dreadful hurries to go this 
afternoon sometimes when Phoebe 's cross and 
won't give me sugar. They don't let you in, 
though, 'nless you 're a good girl." 

" Who gets it all up ? " asked puzzled Molly. 

" Jesus Christ will give me all these beauti- 
ful fings," said Faith, evidently repeating her 
mother's words, — the only catechism that she 
has been taught. 

" And what will he do when he sees you ? " 
asked her mother, coming down the stairs and 
stepping up behind her. 

" Take me up in His arms and kiss me." 



The Gates Ajar. 185 

•'And what will Faith say ? " 

" Faiik — you / " said the child, softly. 

In another minute she was absorbed, body 
and soul, in the mysteries of One Old Cat. 

" But I don't think she will feel much like 
being naughty for half an hour to come," 
her mother said ; "hear how pleasantly her 
words drop ! Such a talk quiets her, like a 
hand laid on her head. Mary, sometimes I 
think it is His very hand, as much as when He 
touched those other little children. I wish 
Faith to feel at home with Him and His home. 
Little thing ! I really do not think that she is 
conscious of any fear of dying ; I do not think 
it means anything to her but Christ, and her 
father, and pink blocks, and a nice time, and 
never disobeying me, or being cross. Many a 
time she wakes me up in the morning ^talking 
away to herself, and when I turn and look at 
her, she says : ' O mamma, won't we go to 
heaven to-day, you fink.? Whe7i will we go, 
mamma ? ' " 

" If there had been any pink blocks and 
ginger-snaps for me when I was at her age, I 
should not have prayed every night to * die 
out.* I think the horrors of death that chil- 
dren live through, unguessed and unrelieved, 



1 86 The Gates Ajar, 

are awful. Faith may thank you all her life 
that she has escaped them." 

"I should feel answerable to God for the 
child's soul, if I had not prevented that. I 
always wanted to know what sort of mother 
that poor little thing had, who asked, if she 
were vejy good up in heaven, whether they 
would n't let her go down to hell Saturday 
afternoons, and play a little while ! " 

" I know. But think of it, — blocks and 
ginger-snaps ! " 

" I treat Faith just as the Bible treats us, by 
dealing in pictures of truth that she can un- 
derstand. I can make Clo and Abinadab 
Quirk comprehend that their pianos and ma- 
chinery may not be made of literal rosewood 
and steel, but will be some synonyme of the 
thing, which will answer just such wants of 
their changed natures as rosewood and steel 
must answer now. There will be machinery 
and pianos in the same sense in which there 
will be pearl gates and harps. Whatever en- 
joyment any cr all of them represent now, 
something wij lepresent then. 

" But Faith, if I told her that her heavenly 
ginger-snaps would not be made of molasses 
and flour, would have a cry, for fear that she 



The Gates Ajar. 187 

was not going to have any ginger-snaps at all ; 
so, until she is older, I give her unqualified 
ginger-snaps. The principal joy of a child's 
life consists in eating. Faith begins, as soon 
as the light wanes, to dream of that gum-drop 
which she is to have at bedtime. I don't sup- 
pose she can outgrow that at once by passing 
out of her little round body. She must begin 
where she left off, — nothing but a baby, though 
It will be as holy and happy a baby as Christ 
can make it. When she says : " Mamma, I 
shall be hungery and want my dinner, up 
there," I never hesitate to tell her that she 
shall have her dinner. She would never, in 
her secret heart, though she might not have 
the honesty to say so, expect to be otherwise 
than miserable in a dinnerless eternity." 

" You are not afraid of misleading the 
child's fancy } " 

" Not so long 'as I Can keep the two ideas — 
that Christ is her best friend, and that heaven 
is not meant for naughty girls — pre-eminent 
in her mind. And I sincerely believe that He 
would give her the very pink blocks which she 
anticipates, no less than He would give back a 
poet his lost dreams, or you your brother. 
He has been a child ; perhaps, incidentally 



1 88 The Gates Ajar. 

to the unsolved mysteries of atonement, for 
this very reason, — that He may know how to 
* prepare their places ' for them, whose angels 
do always behold His Father. Ah, you may 
be sure that, if of such is the happy Kingdom, 
He will not scorn to stoop and fit it to their 
little needs. 

" There was that poor little fellow whose 
guinea-pig died, — do you remember ? " 

" Only half ; what was it .? " 

" * O mamma,* " he sobbed out, behind his 
handkerchief, * don't great big elephants have 
souls ? * 

" * No, my son.* 

" * Nor camels, mamma ? ' 

"*No.' 

" * Nor bears, nor alligators, nor chickens ?' 

" ' O no, dear.' 

" * O mamma, mamma ! Don't little clean — 
white — gidiiea-pigs have souls 1 ' 

" I never should have had the heart to say 
no to that ; especially as we have no positive 
proof to the contrary. 

" Then that scrap of a boy who lost his little 
red balloon the morning he bought it, and, 
broken-hearted, wanted to know whether it 
had gone to heaven. Don't I suppose if he 



The Gates Ajar. 1^9 

had been laker^ there himself that very mmute, 
that he would have found a little balloon in 
waiting for him ? How can I help it ? " 

" It has a pretty sound. If people would 
not think it so material and shocking — " 

" Let people read Martin Luther's letter to 
his little boy. There is the testimony of a 
pillar in good and regular standing ! I don't 
think you need be afraid of my balloon, after 
that." 

I remembered that there was a letter of his 
on heaven, but, not recalling it distinctly, I 
hunted for it to-night, and read it over. I 
shall copy it, the better to retain it in mind. 

" Grace and peace in Christ, my dear little 
son. I see with pleasure that thou learnest 
well, and prayed diligently. Do so, my son, 
and continue. When I come home I will 
bring thee a pretty fairing. 

" I know a pretty, merry garden wherein are 
many children. They have little golden coats, 
and they gather beautiful apples under the 
trees, and pears, cherries, plums, and wheat- 
plums ; — they sing, and jump, and are merry. 
They have beautiful little horses, too, with gold 
bits and silver saddles. And I asked the man 
to whom the garden belongs, who.se children 



190 The Gates Ajar. 

they were. And he said : * They are the chil- 
dren that love to pray and to learn, and are 
good.' Then said I : * Dear man, I have a son, 
too ; his name is Johnny Luther. May he not 
also come into this garden and eat these beau- 
tiful apples and pears, and ride these fine 
horses } ' Then the man said : ' If he loves to 
pray and to learn, and is good, he shall come 
into this garden, and Lippus ana Jost too; and 
when they all come together, they shall have 
fifes and trumpets, lutes and all sorts of music, 
and they shall dance, and shoot with little 
cross-bows.' 

" And he showed me a fine meadow there in 
the garden, made for dancing. There hung 
nothing but golden fifes, trumpets, and fine 
silver cross-bows. But it was early, and the 
children had not yet eaten ; therefore I could 
not wait the dance, and I said to the man : 
* Ah, dear sir ! I will immediately go and write 
all this to my little son Johnny, and tell him 
to pray diligently, and to learn well, and to 
be good, so that he also may come to this 
garden. But he has an Aunt Lehne, he must 
bring her with him.' Then the man said : * It 
shall be so ; go, and write him so.' 

" Therefore, my dear little son Johnny, learn 



The Gates Ajar, 191 

and pray away ! and tell Lippus and Jost, too 
that they must learn and pray. And then you 
shall come to the garden together. Herewith 
I commend thee to Almighty God. And 
greet Aunt Lehne, and give her a kiss for my 
sake. 

" Thy dear Father, 

"Martinus Luther, 



192 The Gates Ajar, 



XIII. 

August 3. 

The summer is sliding quietly away, — my 
desolate summer which I dreaded ; with the 
dreams gone from its wild flowers, the crown 
from its sunsets, the thrill from its winds and 
its singing. 

But I have found out a thing. One can live 
without dreams and crowns and thrills. 

I have not lost them. They lie under the 
ivied cross with Roy for a little while. They 
will come back to me with him. " Nothing is 
lost," she teaches me. And until they come 
back, I see — for she shows me — fields groan- 
ing under their white harvest, with laborers 
very few. Ruth followed the sturdy reapers, 
gleaning a little. I, perhaps, can do as much. 
The ways in which I must work seem so small 
and insignificant, so pitifully trivial sometimes, 
that I do not even like to write them down 
here. In fact, they are so small that, six 
months ago, I did not see them at all. Only 
to be pleasant to old Phoebe, and charitable to 



The Gates Ajar. 193 

Meta Tripp, and faithful to my not very in- 
teresting little scholars, and a bit watchful of 
worn-out Mrs. Bland, and — But dear me, I 
won't ! They are so little ! 

But one's self becomes of less importance, 
"which seems to be the point. 

It seems very strange to me sometimes, 
looking back to those desperate winter days, 
what a change has come over my thoughts of 
Roy. Not that he is any less — O, never any 
less to me. But it is almost as if she had 
raised him from the grave. Why seek ye the 
living among the dead } Her soft, compassion- 
ate eyes shine with the question every hour. 
And every hour he is helping me, — ah, Roy, 
we understand one another now. 

How he must love Aunt Winifred ! How 
pleasant the days will be when we can talk 
her over, and thank her together ! 

" To be happy because Roy is happy." I 
remember how those first words Oi" hers 
struck me. It does not seem to me impossi- 
ble, now. 

Aunt 'Winifred and I laugh at each other 
for talking so much about heaven. I see that 
the green book is filled with my questions and 
9 ^ 



194 "^^^^ Gates Ajar, 

her answers. The fact is, not that we do not 
talk as much about mundane affairs as other 
people, but that this one thing interests us 
more. 

If, instead, it had been flounces, or babies, 
or German philosophy, the green book would 
have filled itself just as unconsciously with 
flounces, or babies, or German philosophy. 
This interest in heaven is of course no sign of 
especial piety in me, nor could people with 
young, warm, uncrushed hopes throbbing 
through their days be expected to feel the 
same. It is only the old principle of, where 
the treasure is — the heart. 

" How spiritual-minded Mary has grown ! " 
Mrs. Bland observes, regarding me respect 
fully. I try in vain to laugh her out of the 
conviction. If Roy had not gone before, 1 
should think no more, probably, about the 
coming life, than does the minister's wife her- 
self 

But now — I cannot help it — that is the 
reality, this the dream ; that the substance, 
this the shadow. 

The other day Aunt Winifred and I had a 
talk which has been of more value to me than 
all the rest. 



The Gates Ajar. 195 

Faith was in bed ; it was a cold, rainy even- 
ing ; we were secure from callers ; we lighted 
a few kindlers in the parlor grate ; she rolled 
up the easy-chair, and I took my cricket at 
her feet. 

" Paul at the feet of Gamaliel ! This is 
what I call comfort. Now, Auntie, let us go 
to heaven awhile." 

"Very well. What do you want there 
now .? " 

I paused a moment, sobered by a thought 
that has been growing steadily upon me of 
late. 

" Something more. Aunt Winifred. All 
these other things are beautiful and dear ; but 
I believe I want — God. 

"You have not said much about Him. The 
Bible says a great deal about Him. You have 
given me the filling-up of heaven in all its 
pleasant promise, but — I don't know — there 
seems to be an outline wanting." 

She drew my hand uj into hers, smiling. 

" I have not done my painting by artistic 
methods, I know ; but it was not exactly acci- 
dental. 

" Tell me, honestly, — is God more to you or 
less, a more distinct Being or a more vague 



196 The Gates Ajar. 

one, than He was six months ago ? Is He, or 
is He not, dearer to you now than then ? " 

I thought about it a minute, and then turned 
my face up to her. 

" Mary, what a light in your eyes 1 How 
is it?" 

It came over me slowly, but it came with 
such a passion of gratitude and unworthiness, 
that I scarcely knew how to tell her — that He 
never has been to me, in all my life, what he is 
now at the end of these six months. He was 
once an abstract Grandeur which I struggled 
more in fear than love to please. He has be- 
come a living Presence, dear and real. 

" No dead fact stranded on the shore 
Of the oblivious years ; 
But warm, sweet, tender, even yet 
A present help." .... 

He was an inexorable Mystery who took 
Roy from me to lose him in the glare of a 
more inexorable heaven. He is a Father who 
knew better than we that we should be parted 
for a while ; but He only means it to be a little 
while. He is keeping him for me to find in 
the flush of some summer morning, on which I 
shall open my eyes no less naturally than I 
open them on June sunrises now. I alway.s 
have that fancy of going in the morning. 



The Gates Ajar, 197 

She understood what I could not tell her, 
and said, " I thought it would be so." 

"You, His interpreter, have done it," I an- 
swered her. " His heaven shows what He is, — 
don't you see ? — like a friend's letter. I could 
no more go hack to my old groping relations to 
Him, than I could make of you the dim and 
somewhat apocryphal Western Auntie that you 
were before I saw you." 

" Which was precisely why I have dealt with 
this subject as I have," she said. " You had all 
your life been directed to an indefinite heaven, 
where the glory of God was to crowd out all 
individuality and all human joy from His most 
individual and human creatures, till the " Glory 
cf God " had become nothing but a name and 
a dread to you. So I let those three words 
slide by, and tried to bring you to them, as 
Christ brought the Twelve to believe in him, 
* for the works' sake.' 

" Yes, my child ; clinging human loves, 
stifled longings, cries for rest, forgotten hopes, 
shall have their answer. Whatever the be- 
wilderment of beauties folded away for us in 
heavenly nature and art, they shall strive with 
each other to make us glad. These 'things 
have their pleasant place. But, through eter- 



198 The Gates Ajar. 

nity, thsre will be always something beyond 
and dearer than the dearest of them. God 
himself will be fiist, — naturally and of necessi- 
ty, without strain or struggle, y^rj-/." 

When I sat here last winter with my dead 
in my house, those words would have roused 
in me an agony of wild questionings. I should 
have beaten about them and beaten against 
them, and cried in my honest heart that they 
were false. I knew that I loved Roy more 
than I loved such a Being as God seemed to 
me then to be. Now, they strike me as sim- 
ply and pleasantly true. The more I love 
Roy, the more I love Him. He loves us both. 

" You see it could not be otherwise," she 
went on, speaking low. *' Where would you be, 
or I, or they who seem to us so much dearer 
and better than ourselves, if it were not for 
Jesus Christ } What can heaven be to us, but 
a song of the love that is the same to us yes- 
terday, to-day, and forever, — that, in the mys- 
tery of an intensity which we shall perhaps 
never understand, could choose death and be 
glad in the choosing, and, what is more than 
that, could live life for us for three-and-thirty 
years t 

'* I cannot strain my faith — or rather my 



The Gates Ajar, X99 

common sense — to the rhapsodies with which 
many people fill heaven. But it seems to me 
like this : A friend goes away from us, and it 
may be seas or worlds that lie between us, and 
we love him. He leaves behind him his little 
keepsakes ; a lock of hair to curl about our 
fingers ; a picture that has caught the trick of 
his eyes or smile ; a book, a flower, a letter. 
What we do with the curling hair, what we 
say to the picture, what we dream over the 
flower and the letter, nobody knows but our- 
selves. People have risked life for such me- 
mentoes. Yet who loves the senseless gift 
more than the giver, — the curl more than the 
young forehead on which it fell, — the letter 
more than the hand which traced it t 

" So it seems to me that we shall learn to 
see in God the centre of all possibilities of joy. 
The greatest of these lesser delights is but the 
greater measure of His friendship. They will 
not mean less of pleasure, but more of Him. 
They will not " pale," as Dr. Bland would 
ij^y. Human dearness will wax, not wane, in 
heaven ; but human friends will be loved for 
love of Him." 

" I see ; that helps me ; like a torch in a dark 
room. But there will be shadows in the cor- 



200 The Gates Ajar, 

ners. Do you suppose that we shall tv&r fully 
feel it in the body ?" 

" In the body, probably not. We see through 
a glass so darkly that the temptation to idola- 
try is always our greatest. Golden images' 
did not die with Paganism. At times I fan- 
cy that, somewhere between this world and 
another, a revelation will come upon us like 
a flash, of what si7i really is, — such a revela- 
tion, lighting up the lurid background of our 
past in such colors, that the consciousness of 
what Christ has done for us will be for a time 
as much as heart can bear. After that, the 
mystery will be, not how to love Him most, but 
that we ever cotcld have loved any creature or 
thing as much." 

." We serve God quite as much by active 
work as by special prayer, here," I said after 
some thought ; " how will it be there } " 

" We must be busily at work certainly ; but 
I think there must naturally be more com- 
munion with Him then. Now, this phrase 
" communion with God " has been worn, and 
not always well worn. 

" Prayer means to us, in this life, more often 
penitent confession than happy interchange ol 
thought with Him. It is associated, too, with 



The Gates Ajar. 201 

aching limbs and sleepy eyes, and nights when 
the lamp goes out. Obstacles, moral and 
physical, stand in the way of our knowing ex- 
actly what it may mean in the ideal of it. 

*' My best conception of it lies in the frieiid- 
ship of the man Christ Jesus. I suppose he 
will bear with him, eternally, the humanity 
which he took up with him from the Judean 
hills. I imagine that we shall see him in visi- 
ble form like ourselves, among us, yet not of 
us ; that he, himself, is ** Gott mit ihnen " ; 
that we shall talk with him as a man talketh 
with his friend. Perhaps, bowed and hushed 
at his dear feet, we shall hear from his own 
lips the story of Nazareth, of Bethany, of Gol- 
gotha, of the chilly mountains where he used 
to pray all night long for us ; of the desert 
places where he hungered ; of his cry for help 

— think, Mary — His ! — when there was not 
one in all the world to hear it, and there was 
silence in heaven, while angels strengthened 
him and man forsook him. Perhaps his voice 

— the very voice which has sounded whisper- 
ing through our troubled life — " Could ye not 
watch one hour } " — shall unfold its perplexed 
meanings ; shall make its rough places plain ; 
shall show us step by step the merciful way 

9* 



202 The Gates Ajar, 

by which he led us to that hour ; shall point 
out to us, joy by joy, the surprises that he has 
been planning for us, just as the old father in 
the story planned to Surprise his wayward boy 
come home. 

" And such a ' communion,' — which is not 
too much, nor yet enough, to dare to expect of 
a God who was the ' friend ' of Abraham, 
who * walked ' with Enoch, who did not call 
fishermen his servants, — such will be that 
* presence of God,' that ' adoration,' on which 
we have looked from afar off with despairing 
eyes that wept, they were so dazzled, and 
turned themselves away as from the thing they 
greatly feared." 

I think we neither of us cared to talk for a 
while after this. Something made me forget 
even that I was going to see Roy in heaven. 
" Three-and-thirty years. Three-and-thirty 
years." The words rang themselves over. 

" It is on the humanity of Christ," she said 
after some musing, " that all my other reasons 
for hoping for such a heaven as I hope for, rest 
for foundation. He knows exactly what we 
are^ for he has been one of us ; exactly what 
we hope and fear and crave, for he has hoped 
and feared and craved, not the less humanly, 
but only more intensely. 



The Gates Ajar, 203 

''^ If it were not sol — do you take in the 
thoughtful tenderness of that ? A mother, still- 
ing her frightened child in the dark, might 
speak just so, — ^ if it were not so, I would have 
told you,' That brooding love makes room for 
all that we can want. He has sounded every 
deep of a troubled and tempted life. Who so 
sure as he to understand how to prepare a 
place where troubled and tempted lives may 
grow serene ? Further than this ; since he 
stands as our great Type, no less in death and 
after than before it, he answers for us many 
of these lesser questions on the event of which 
so much of our happiness depends. 

" Shall we lose our personality in a vague 
ocean of ether, — you one puff of gas, I an- 
other } — 

" He, with his own wounded body, rose and 
ate and walked and talked. 

" Is all memory of this life to be swept 
away ? — 

" He, arisen, has forgotten nothing. He 
waits to meet his disciples at the old, familiar 
places ; as naturally as if he had never been 
parted from them, he falls in with the cur- 
rent of their thoughts. 

" Has any one troubled us with fears that in 



204 ^^^^ Gates Ajar, 

the glorified crowds of heaven we may miss a 
face dearer than all the world to us ? — 

" He made himself known to his friends ; 
Mary, and the two at Emmaus, and the bewil- 
dered group praying and perplexed in their 
bolted room. 

*' Do we weary ourselves with speculations 
whether human loves can outlive the shock of 
death ? — 

" Mary knew how He loved her, when, turn- 
ing, she heard him call her by her name. 
They knew, whose hearts ' burned within 
them while he talked with them by the way, 
and when he tarried with them, the day being 
far spent.' " 

"And for the rest?" 

** For the rest, about which He was silent, we 
can trust him, and if, trusting, we please our- 
selves with fancies, he would be the last to 
think it blame to us. There is one promise 
which grows upon me the more I study it, * He 
that spared not his own Son, how shall he not 
also with him freely give tis all things f * 
Sometimes I wonder if that does not infold a 
beautiful double entendre^ a hint of much that 
you and I have conjectured, — as one throws 
ddwn a hint of a surprise to a child. 



The Gates Ajar, 205 

"Then there is that pledge to those who 
seek first His kingdom : * All these things shall 
be added unto yoit* * These things/ were food 
and clothing, were varieties of material delight, 
and the words were spoken to men wh^ lived 
hungry, beggared, and died the death of out- 
casts. If this passage could be taken literally, 
it would be very significant in its bearing on 
the future life ; for Christ must keep his prom- 
ise to the letter, in one world or another. It 
may be wrenching the verse, not as a vers**, 
but from the grain of the argument, to insist", 
on the literal interpretation, — though I am 
not sure." 



2o6 The Gates Ajar, 



XIV. 

August 15. 

I asked the other day, wondering whether 
all ministers were like Dr. Bland, what Uncle 
Forceythe used to believe about heaven. 

" Very much what I do," she said. " These 
questions were brought home to him, early in 
life, by the death of a very dear sister ; he had 
thought much about them. I think one of the 
things that so much attached his people to 
him was the way he had of weaving their 
future life in with this, till it grew naturally 
and pleasantly into their frequent thought. 

yes, your uncle supplied me with half of my 
proof-texts." 

Aunt Winifred "has not looked quite well of 
late, I fancy ; though it may be only fancy. 
She has not spoken of it, except one day when 

1 told her that she looked pale. It was the 
heat, she said. 

20th. 
Little Clo came over to-night. I believe 
she thinks Aunt Winifred the best friend she 



The Gates Ajar. 207 

has in the world. Auntie has become much 
attached to all her scholars, and has a rare 
power of winning her way into their confi- 
dence. They come to her with all their little 
interests, — everything, from saving their souls 
to trimming a bonnet. Clo, however, is the 
favorite, as I predicted. 

She looked a bit blue to-night, as girls will 
look ; in fact, her face always has a tinge of 
sadness about it. Aunt Winifred, understand- 
ing at a glance that the child was not in a 
mood to talk before a third, led her away into 
the garden, and they were gone a long time. 
When it grew dark, I saw them coming up the 
path, Clo's hand locked in her teacher's, and 
her face, which was wet, upturned like a child's. 
They strolled to the gate, lingered a little to 
talk, and then Clo said good night without 
coming in. 

Auntie sat for a while after she had gone, 
thinking her over, I could see. 

" Poor thing ! " she said at last, half to her- 
self, half to me, — "poor little foolish thing! 
This is where the dreadful individuality of a 
human soul irks me. There comes a point, 
b'^yond which you caitt help people." 

" What has happened to Clo ? " 



2o8 The Gates Ajar, 

" Nothing, lately. It has been happening for 
two years. Two miserable years are an eter- 
nity, at Clo's age. It is the old story, — a sum- 
mer boarder ; a little flirting ; a little dreaming; 
a little pain ; then autumn, and the nuts 
dropping on the leaves, and he was gone, — 
and knew not what he did, — and the child 
waked up. There was the future ; to bake and' 
sweep, to go to sewing-circles, and sing in the 
choir, and bear the moonlight nights, — and 
she loved him. She has lived through two 
years of it, and she loves him now. Reason 
will not reach such a passion in a girl like Clo. 
I did not tell her that she would put it away 
with other girlish things, and laugh at it her- 
self some happy day, as women have laughed 
at their young fancies before her ; partly 
because that would be a certain way of repel- 
ling her confidence, — she does not believe it, 
and my believing could not make her ; partly 
because I am not quite sure about it myself 
Clo has a good deal of the woman about her ; 
her introspective life is intense. She may 
cherish this sweet misery as she does her 
musical tastes, till it has struck deep root 
There is nothing in the excellent Mrs. Bent- 
ley's household, nor in Homer anywhere, to 



The Gates Ajar. 209 

draw the girl out from herself in time to pre- 
vent the dream from becoming a reality." 

" Poor little thing ! What did you say to 
her ? " 

" You ought to have heard what she said to 
me ! I wish I were at liberty to tell you the 
whole story. What troubles her most is that 
it is not going to help the matter any to die. 
* O Mrs, Forceythe/ she says, in a tone that is 
enough to give the heart-ache, even to such an 
old woman as Mrs. Forceythe, * O Mrs. For- 
ceythe, what is going to become of me up 
there } He never loved me, you see, and he 
never, never will, and he will have some beau- 
tiful, good wife of his own, and I won't have 
iz;y/body ! For I can't love anybody else, — 
I Ve tried ; I tried just as hard as I could to 
love my cousin 'Bin; he's real good, and — 
I *m — afraid 'Bin likes me, though I guess he 
likes his carpet-sweepers better. O, sometimes 
I think, and think, till it seems as if I could 
not bear it ! I don't see how God can make. 
me happy. I wish I could be buried up and 
go to sleep, and never have any heaven I ' " 

"And you told her — } " 

" That she should have him there. That is, 
]i not himself, something, — somebody who 

N 



210 The Gates Ajar. 

would so much more than fill his place, that 
she would never have a lonely or unloved 
minute. Her eyes brightened, and shaded, 
and pondered, doubting. She *did n't see how 
it could ever be.' I told her not to try and 
see how, but to leave it to Christ. He knew 
all about this little trouble of hers, and he 
would make it right. 

" ' Will he ? ' she questioned, sighing ; * but 
there are so many of us ! There 's 'Bin, and a 
plenty more, and I don't see how it 's going to 
be smoothed out. Everything is in a jumble, 
Mrs. Forceythe, don't you see } for some peo- 
ple caiit like and keep liking so many times.* 
Something came into my mind about the 
rough places that shall be made plain, and the 
crooked things straight. I tried to explain to 
her, and at last I kissed away her tears, and 
sent her home, if not exactly comforted, a little 
less miserable, I think, than when she came. 
Ah, well, — I wonder myself sometimes about 
these ' crooked things ' ; but, though I wonder, 
I never doubt." 

She finished her sentence somewhat hurried- 
ly, and half started from her chair, raising both 
hands with a quick, involuntary motion that 
attracted my notice. The lights came in just 



The Ga:es Ajar, 211 

then, and, unless I am much mistaken, her face 
showed paler than usual ; but when I asked 
her if she felt faint, she said, " O no, I be- 
lieve I am a little tired, and will go to 
bed." 

September i. 

I am glad that the summer is over. This 
heat has certainly worn on Aunt Winifred, 
with that kind of wear which slides people into 
confirmed invalidism. I suppose she would 
bear it in her saintly way, as she bears every- 
thing, but it would be a bitter cup for her. I 
know she was always pale, but this is a pale- 
ness which — 

Night 

A dreadful thing has happened ! 

I was in the middle of my sentence, when I 
heard a commotion in the street, and a child's 
voice shouting incoherently something about 
the doctor, and '' motJicr 's killed! O, niotJier's 
killed! mother ^s burnt to death!" I was at 
the window in time to see a blond-haired girl 
running wildly past the house, and to see that 
it was Molly Eland. 

At the same moment I saw Aunt Winifred 
snatching her hat from its nail in the entry. 
She beckoned to me to follow, and we were 



212 The Gates Ajar. 

half-way over to the parsonage before I had a 
distinct thought of what I was about. 

We came upon a horrible scene. Dr. Bland 
was trying to do everything alone ; there was 
not a woman in the house to. help him, for 
they have never been able to keep a servant, 
and none of the neighbors had had time to be 
there before us. The poor husband was grow- 
ing faint, I think. Aunt Winifred saw by a 
look that he could not bear much more, sent 
him after Molly for the doctor, and took every- 
thing meantime into her own charge. 

I shall not write down a word of it. It was 
a sight that, once seen, will never leave me as 
long as I live. My nerves are thoroughly 
shaken by it, and it must be put out of thought 
as far as possible. 

It seems that the little boy — the baby — 
crept into the kitchen by himself, and began 
to throw the contents of the match-box on the 
stove, " to make a bonfire," the poor little fel- 
low said. In five minutes his apron was ablaze. 
His mother was on the spot at his first cry, and 
smothered the little apron, and saved the child, 
but her dress was muslin, and everybody was 
too far oflf to hear her at first, — and by the 
time her husband came in from the garden it 
was too late. 



TJie Gates Ajar. 213 

She is living yet. Her husband, pacing the 
room back and forth, and crouching on his 
knees by the hour, is praying Go4 to let her 
die before the morning. 

Morning. 

There is no chance of life, the doctor says. 
But he has been able to find something that 
has lessened her sufferings. She lies partially 
unconscious. 

Wednesday night. 

Aunt Winifred and I were over at the par- 
sonage to-night, when she roused a little from 
her stupor and recognized us. She spoke to 
her husband, and kissed me good by, and asked 
for the children. They were playing softly in 
the next room ; we sent for them, and they 
came in, — the four unconscious, motherless 
little things, — with the sunlight in their hair. 

The bitterness of death came into her 
marred face at sight of them, and she raised 
her hands to Auntie — to the only other 
mother there — with a sudden helpless cry : 
" I could bear it. I could bear it, if it were n't 
for them. Without any mother all their lives, 
— such little things, — and to go away where 
I can't do a single tiling for them 1 " 



214 27/^ Gates Ajar. 

Aunt Winifred stooped down and spoke low, 
but decidedly. 

"You 'will do for them. God knows all 
about it. He will not send you away from 
them. You shall be just as much their mother, 
every day of their lives, as you have been here. 
Perhaps there is something to do for them 
v/hich you never could have done here. He 
sees. He loves them. He loves you." 

If I could paint, I might paint the look that 
struck through and through that woman's 
dying face ; but words cannot touch it. If I 
were Aunt Winifred, I should bless God on my 
knees to-night for having shown me how to 
give such ease to a soul in death. 

Thursday morning. 

God is merciful. I\Irs. Bland died at five 
o'clock. 

loth. 

How such a voice from the heavens shocks 
one out of the repose- of calm sorrows and of 
calm joys. This has come and gone so sudden- 
ly that I cannot adjust it to any quiet and trust- 
ful thinking yet. 

The whole parish mourns excitedly ; for, 
though they worked their minister's wife hard, 



The Gates Ajar. 215 

they loved her well. I cannot talk it over with 
the rest. It jars. Horror should never be 
dissected. Besides, my heart is too full of 
those four little children with the sunlight in 
their hair and the unconsciousness in thwir 
ey^s. 

15th. 

Mrs. Quirk came over to-day in great per- 
plexity. She had just come from the minis- 
ter's. 

" I don't know what we 're a goin' to do with 
him ! " she exclaimed in a gush of impatient, 
uncomprehending sympathy ; " you can't let a 
man take on that way much longer. He "11 
worry himself sick, and then we shall either 
lose him or have to pay his bills to Europe ! 
Why, he jest stops in the house, and walks his 
stijdy up and down, day and night ; or else he 
jest sets and sets and don't notice nobody but 
the children. Now I 've jest ben over makin' 
him some chicken-pie, — he used to set a sight 
by my chicken-pie, — And he made believe to 
eat it, 'cause I 'd ben at the trouble, I suppose, 
but how much do you suppose he swallowed ? 
Jest three mouthfuls ! Thinks says I, I won't 
spend my time over chicken-pie for the afflict- 
ed agin, and on ironing-day, too I When I 



2i6 Ifie Gates Ajar. 

knocked at the study door, he said, * Come in, 
and stopped his walkin' and turned as quick. 

" ' O,' says he, * good morning. I thought it 
was Mrs. Forceythe.' 

" I told him no, I was n't Mrs. Forceythe, but 
I 'd come to comfort him in his sorrer all the 
same. But that 's the only thing I have agin 
our minister. He won't be comforted. Mary 
Ann Jacobs, who 's ben there kind of looking 
after the children and things for him, you 
know, sence the funeral — she says he 's asked 
three or four times for you, Mrs. Forceythe. 
There 's ben plenty of his people in to see him, 
but you haven't ben nigh him, Mary Ann 
says." 

" I stayed away because I thought the pres- 
ence of friends at this time would be an intru- 
sion," Auntie said ; " but if he would like to 
see me, that alters the case. I will go, certainly." 

" I don't know," suggested Mrs. Quirk, look- 
ing over the tops of her spectacles, — "I s'pose 
it 's proper enough, but you bein' a widow, you 
know, and his wife — " 

Aunt Winifred's eyes shot fire. She stood 
up and turned upon Mrs. Quirk with a look 
the like of which I presume that worthy lady 
had never seen before, and is not likely to see 



The Gates Ajar, 217 

soon again (it gave the beautiful scorn of a 
Zeiiobia to her fair, slight face), moved her lips 
slightly, but said nothing, put on her bonnet, 
and went straight to Dr. Bland's. 

llie minister, they told her, was in his study. 
She knocked lightly at the door, and was bid- 
den in a lifeless voice to enter. 

Shades and blinds were drawn, and the 
glare of the sun quite shut out. Dr. Bland sat 
by his study-table, with his face upon his hands. 
A Bible lay open before him. It had been 
lately used ; the leaves were wet. 

He raised his head dejectedly, but srniled 
when he saw who it was. He had been think- 
ing about her, he said, and was glad that she 
had come. 

I do not know all that passed between them, 
but I gather, from such hints as Auntie in her 
unconsciousness throws out, that she had things 
to say which touched some comfortless places 
in the man's heart: No Greek and Hebrew 
*' original," no polished dogma, no link in his 
stereotyped logic, not one of his eloquent ser- 
mons on the future state, came to his relief. 

These were meant for happy days. They 
rang cold as steel upon the warm needs of 
an afflicted man. Brought face to face, and 
10 



2i8 The Gates Ajar, 

sharply, with the blank heaven of his belief, 
he stood up from before his dead, and groped 
about it, and cried out against it in the bitter- 
ness of his soul. 

" I had no chance to prepare myself to bow 
to the will of God," he said, his reserved min- 
isterial manner in curious contrast with the 
caged way in which he was pacing the room, 
— "I had no chance. I am taken by surprise, 
as by a thief in the night. I had a great deal 
to say to her, and there was no time. She 
could tell me what to do with my poor little 
children. I wanted to tell her other things. 
I wanted to tell her — Perhaps we all of us 
have our regrets when the Lord removes our 
friends ; we may have done or left undone 
many things ; we might have made them hap- 
pier. My mind does not rest with assurance 
in its conceptions of the heavenly state. If I 
never can tell her — " 

He stopped abruptly, and paced into the 
darkest shadows of the shadowed room, his 
face turned away. 

" You said once some pleasant things about 
heaven } " he said at last, half appealingly, 
stopping in frdht of her, hesitating ; like a man 
and like a minister, hardly ready to come with 



The Gates Ajar, 219 

all the learning of his schools and commenta- 
tors and sit at the feet of a woman. 

She talked with him for a time in her unob- 
trusive way, deferring, when she honestly could, 
to his clerical judgment, and careful not to 
wound him by any word ; but frankly and 
clearly, as she always talks. 

When she rose to go he thanked her quietly. 

" This is a somewhat novel train of thought 
to me," he said ; " I hope it may not prove an 
unscriptural one. I have been reading the 
book of Revelation to-day with these questions 
especially in mind. We are never too old to 
learn. Some passages may be capable of 
other interpretations than I have formerly 
given them. No matter what I wishy you see, 
I must be guided by the Word of my God." 

Auntie says that she never respected the man 
so much as she did when, hearing those words, 
she looked up into his haggard face, convulsed 
with its human pain and longing. 

" I hope you do not think that / am not 
guided by the Word of God," she answered. 
** I mean to be." 

" I know you mean to be," he said cordiaUv. 
** 1 do not say that you are not. I may come 
to see that you are, and that you are right 



220 The Gates Ajaf. 

It will be a peaceful day for me if I can ever 
quite agree with your methods of reasoning. 
But I must think these things over. I thank 
you once more for coming. Your sympathy 
is grateful to me." 

Just as she closed the door he called her 
back. 

" See," he said, with a saddened smile. " At 
least I shall never preach this again. It seems 
to me that life is always undoing for us some- 
thing that we have just laboriously done." 

He held up before her a mass of old blue 
manuscript, and threw it, as he spoke, upon 
the embers left in his grate. It smoked and 
blazed up and burned out. 

It was that sermon on heaven of which 
there is an abstract in this journal 

20th. 

Aunt Winifred hired Mr. Tripp's gray this 
afternoon, and drove to East Homer on some 
unexplained errand. She did not invite me to 
go with her, and Faith, though she teased im- 
pressively, was left at home. Her mother was 
gone till late, — so late that I had begun to be 
anxious about her, and heard through the 
dark the first sound of the buggy wheels, with 



The Gates Ajar. 221 

great relief. She looked very tired when I 
met her at the gate. She had not been able, 
she said, to accomplish her errand at East 
Homer, and from there had gone to Worces- 
ter by railroad, leaving Old Gray at the East 
Homer Eagle till her return. She told me 
nothing more, and I asked no questions 



222 Tlie Gates Ajar. 



XV. 

Sunday. 

Faith has behaved like a witch all day. 
She knocked down three crickets and six 
hymn-books in church this morning, and this 
afternoon horrified the assembled and devout 
congregation by turning round in the middle 
of the long prayer, and, in a loud and distinct 
voice, asking Mrs. Quirk for " 'nother those 
pepp'mints such as you gave me one Sunday 
a good many years ago, you 'member." After 
church, her mother tried a few Bible questions 
to keep her still. 

" Faith, who was Christ's father } " 

"Jerusalem ! " said Faith, promptly. 

"Where did his parents take Jesus when 
they fled from Herod ? " 

" O, to Europe. Of course I knew that ! 
Everybody goes to Europe." 

To-night, when her mother had put her to 
bed, she came down laughing. 

"Faith does seem to have a hard time with 



The Gates Ajar. 223 

the Lord's Prayer. To-night, being very sleepy 
and in a hurry to finish, she proceeded with 
great solemnity : — * Our Father who art in 
heaven, hallowed be thy name ; six days shalt 
thou labor and do all thy work, and — Oh ! ' 

*' I was just thinking how amused her father 
must be." 

Auntie says many such things. I cannot 
explain how pleasantly they strike me, nor how 
they help me. 

29th. 

Dr. Bland gave us a good sermon yesterday. 
There is an indescribable change in all his ser- 
mons. There is a change, too, in the man, 
and that something more than the haggard- 
ness of grief I not only respect him and am 
sorry for him, but I feel more ready to be 
taught by him than ever before. A certain 
indefinable Jmmaiiness softens his eyes and 
tones, and seems to be creeping into every- 
thing that he says. Yet, on the other hand, 
his people say that they have never heard him 
speak such pleasant, helpful things concern- 
insf his and their relations to God. I met him 
the other night, coming away from his wife's 
grave, and was struck by the expression of his 
face. I wondered if he were not slowly find- 



224 The Gates Ajar, 

ing the " peaceful day," of which he told Aur- 
Winifred. 

She, by the way, has taken another of hex 
mysterious trips to Worcester. 

30th. 

We were wondering to-day where it will be, 
— I mean heaven. 

" It is impossible to do more than wonder," 
Auntie said, " though we are explicitly told 
that there will be new heavens and a new 
earth, which seems, if anything can b^ taken 
literally in the Bible, to point to this world as 
the future home of at least some of us." 

" Not for all of us, of course ? " 

" I don't feel sure. I know that somebody 
spent his valuable time in estimating that all 
the people who have lived and died upon the 
earth would cover it, alive or buried, twice 
over ; but I know that somebody else claims 
with equal solemnity to have discovered that 
they could all be buried in the State of Penn- 
sylvania ! But it would be of little conse- 
quence if we could not all find room here, 
since there mugt be other provision for us." 

" Why .? " 

" Certainly there is * a place * in which we 
are promised that we shall be *with Christ/ 



The Gates Ajar, 225 

this world being yet the great theatre of hu- 
man life and battle-ground of Satan ; no place, 
certainly, in which to confine a happy soul 
without prospect of release. The Spiritualistic 
notion of * circles ' of dead friends revolving 
over us is to me intolerable. I want my hus- 
band with me when I need him, but I hope he 
has a place to be happy in, which is out of this 
woful world. * 

" The old astronomical idea, stars around 
a sun, and systems around a centre, and that 
centre the Throne of God, is not an unreason- 
able one. Isaac Taylor, among his various 
conjectures, inclines, I fancy, to suppose that 
the sun of each system is the heaven of that 
system. Though the glory of God may be 
more directly and impressively exhibited in 
one place than in another, we may live in 
different planets, and some of us, after its de- 
struction and renovation, on this same dear 
old, happy and miserable, loved and maltreated 
earth. I hope I shall be one of them. I 
should like to come back and build me a beau- 
tiful home in Kansas, — I mean in what was 
Kansas, — among the happy people and the 
familiar, transfigured spots where John and I 
worked for God so long together. That-- 
10* o 



226 The Gates Ajar, 

with my dear Lord to see and speak with 
every day — would be * Heaven our Home.* " 

" There will be no days, then ? " 

" There will be succession of time. There 
may not be alternations of twenty-four hours 
dark or light, but * I use with thee an earthly 
language/ as the wife said in that beautiful 
little * Awakening/ of Therrmin's. Do you 
remember it } Do read it over, if you have n't 
read it lately. 

" As to our coming back here, there is an 
echo to Peter's assertion, in the idea of a world 
under a curse, destroyed and regenerated, — the 
atonement of Christ reaching, with something 
more than pgetic force, the very sands of the 
earth which he trod with bleeding feet to make 
himself its Saviour. That makes me feel — 
don't you see ? — what a taint there is in sin. 
If dumb dust is to have such awful cleansing, 
what must be needed for you and me ? 

" How many pleasant talks we have had 
about these things, Mary ! Well, it cannot 
be long, at the longest, before we know, even 
as we are known." 

I looked at her smiling white face, — it is 
always very white now, — and something 
struck slowly through me, like a chilL 



Tlie Gates Ajar, 227 

October 16, midnight 

There is no such thing as sleep at present. 
Writing is better than thinking. 

Aunt Winifred went again to Worcester 
to-day. She said that she had to buy trim- 
ming for Faith's sack. 

She went alone, as usual, and Faith and I 
kept each other company through the after- 
noon, — she on the floor with Mary Ann, I in 
the easy-chair with Macaulay. As the light 
began to fall level on the floor, I threw the 
book aside, — being at the end of a volume, — 
and, Mary Ann having exhausted her attrac- 
tions, I surrendered unconditionally to the little 
maiden. 

She took me up garret, and down cellar, on 
lop of the wood-pile, and into the apple-trees ; 
I fathomed the mysteries of Old Man's Castle 
and Still Palm ; I was her grandmother, I was 
her baby, I was a rabbit, I was a chestnut 
horse, I was a watch-dog, I was a mild-tem- 
pered giant, I was a bear " warranted not to 
eat little girls," I was a roaring hippopotamus 
and a canary bird, I was Jeff* Davis and I was 
Moses in the bulrushes, and of what I was, the 
time faileth me to tell. 

It comes over me with a curious, mingled 



228 The Gates Ajar. 

sense of the ludicrous and the horrible, that I 
should have spent the afternoon like a baby 
and almost as happily, laughing out with the 
child, past and future forgotten, the tremen- 
dous risks of "I spy" absorbing all my pres 
ent ; while what was happening was happen- 
ing, and what was to come was coming. Not 
an echo in the air, not a prophecy in the 
sunshine, not a note of warning in the song of 
the robins that watched me from the apple- 
bjughs ! 

As the long, golden afternoon slid away, we 
came out by the front gate to watch for the 
child's mother. I was tired, and, lying back 
on the grass, gave Faith some pink and purple 
larkspurs, that she might amuse herself in 
making a chain of them. The picture that 
she made sitting there on the short, dying 
grass — the light which broke all about her 
and over her at the first, creeping slowly down 
and away to the west, her little fingers linking 
the rich, bright flowers tube into tube, the 
dimple on her cheek and the love in her eyes 
— has photographed itself into my thinking. 

Hojv her voice rang out, when the wheels 
sounded at last, and the carriage, somewhat 
slowly driven, stopped ! 



The Gates Ajar, 229 

"Mamma, mamma! see what I've got for 
you, mamma ! " 

Auntie tried to step from the carriage, and 
called me : " Mary, can you help me a little ? 
I am — tired.'* 

I went to her, and she leaned heavily on my 
arm, and we came up the path. 

" Such a pretty little chain, all for you, 
mamma," began Faith, and stopped, struck by 
her mother's look. 

" It has been a long ride, and I am in pain. 
I believe I will lie right down on the parlor 
sofa. l\Iary, would you be kind enough to 
give Faith her supper and put her to bed ? " 

Faith's lip grieved. 

" Cousin Mary is n't you, mamma. I want 
to be kissed. You have n't kissed me." 

Her mother hesitated for a moment : then 
kissed her once, twice ; put both arms about 
her neck ; and turned her face to the wall 
without a word. 

" Mamma is tired, dear," I said ; " come 
away." 

She was lying quite still when I had done 
what was to be done for the child, and had 
come back. The room was nearly dark. I 
sat down on my cricket by her sofa. 



230 The Gates Ajar, 

** Shall Phoebe light the lamp ?" 

"Not just yet." 

" Can't you drink a cup of tea if I bring it ? ** 

" Not just yet." 

" Did you find the sack-trimming ? " I ven- 
tured, after a pause. 

" I believe so, — yes." 

She drew a little package from her pocket, 
held it a moment, then let it roll to the floor 
forgotten. When I picked it up, the soft, 
tissue-paper wrapper was wet and hot with 
tears. 

« Mary ? " 

"Yes." 

" I never thought of the little trimming till 
the last minute. I had another errand." 

I waited. 

" I thought at first I would not tell you just 
yet. But I suppose the time has come ; it will 
be no more easy to put it off. I have been to 
Worcester all these times to see a doctor." 

I bent my head in the dark, and listened for 
the rest. 

" He has his reputation ; they said he could 
help me if anybody could. He thought at 
first he could. But to-day — Mary, see here." 

She walked feebly towards the window. 



The Gates Ajar, 231 

ivhere a faint, gray light struggled in, and 
opened the bosom of her dress 

There was silence between us for a long 
while after that; she went back to the sofa, 
and I took her hand and bowed my face over 
it, and so we sat. 

The leaves rustled out of doors. Faith, up 
stairs, was singing herself to sleep with a 
droning sound. ^ 

" He talked of risking an operation," she 
said, at length, "but decided to-day that it 
was quite useless. I suppose I must give up 
and be sick now ; I am feeling the reaction from 
having kept up so long. He thinks I shall 
not suffer a very great deal. He thinks he 
can relieve me, and that it may be soon over." 

" There is no chance } " 

" No chance." 

I took both of her hands, and cried out, I 
believe, as I did that first night when she 
spoke to me of Roy, — " Auntie, Auntie, Aun- 
tie ! " and tried to think what I was doing, but 
only cried out the more. 

" Why, Mary ! " she said, ■— • " why, Mary ! " 
and again, as before, she passed her soft hand 
to and fro across my hair, till by and by I be- 
gan to think, as I had thought before, that I 



232 The Gates Ajar, 

could bear anything which God who loved us 
all — who surely lovgd us all — should send. 

So then, after I had grown still, she began 
to tell me about it in her quiet voice, and the 
leaves rustled, and Faith had sung herself to 
sleep, and I listened wondering. For there 
was no pain in the quiet voice, — no pain, nor 
tone of fear. Indeed, it seemed to me that 
I detected,* through its subdued sadness, a 
secret, suppressed buoyancy of satisfaction, 
with which something struggled. 

" And you ? " I asked, turning quickly upon 
her. 

"I should thank God with all my heart, 
Mary, if it were not for Faith and you. But it 
is for Faith and you. That's all." 

When I had locked the front door, and was 
creeping up here to my room, my foot crushed 
something, and'a faint, wounded perfume came 
up. It was the little pink and purple chain. 



The Gates Ajar, 233 



XVI. 

October 17. 

•* The Lord God a'mighty help us ! but His 
ways are past finding out. What with one 
thing and another thing, that child without a 
mother, and you with the crape not yet rusty 
for ]\Ir. Roy'l, it doos seem to me as if His 
manner of treating folks beats all ! But I tell 
you this. Miss Mary, my dear ; you jest say 
your prayers reg'lar and stick to Him, and 
He'll pull you through, sure ! " 

This was what Phoebe said when I told her. 

November 8. 

To-night, for the first time, Auntie fairly 
gave up trying to put Faith to bed. She had 
insisted on it until now, crawling up by the 
banisters like a wounded thing. This time 
she tottered and sank upon the second step. 
She cried out, feebly : " I am afraid I must 
give it up to Cousin Mary. Faith ! " — the 
child clung with both hands to her, — " Faith, 
Faith ! Mother's little girl ! " 



234 ^^^ Gates Ajar. 

It was the last dear care of motherhood 
yielded ; the last link snapped. It seemed to 
be the very bitterness of parting. 

I turned away, that they might bear it to- 
gether, they two alone. 

19th. 
Yet I think that took away the sting. 

The days are slipping away now very 
quietly, and — to her I am sure, and to me for 
her sake — very happily. 

She suffers less than I had feared, and she 
lies upon the bed and smiles, and Faith comes 
in and plays about, and the cheery morning 
sunshine falls on everything, and when her 
strong hours come, we have long talks to- 
gether, hand clasped in hand. 

Such pleasant talks ! We are quite brave 
to speak of anything, since we know that what 
is to be is best just so, and since we fear no 
parting. I tell her that Faith and I will soon 
learn to shut our eyes and think we see her, 
and try to make it almost the same, for she 
will never be very far away, will she } And 
then she shakes her head smiling, for it pleases 
her, and she kisses me softly. Then we dream 
of how it will all be, and how we shall love and 
try to please each other quite as much as now. 



The Gates Ajar. 235 

** It will be like going around a corner, don't 
you see ? " she says. " You will know that I 
am there all the while, though hidden, and 
that if you call me I shall hear." Then we 
talk of Faith, and of how I shall comfort her ; 
that I shall teach her this, and guard her irom 
that, and how I shall talk with her about 
heaven and her mother. Sometimes Faith 
comes up and wants to know what we are say- 
ing, and lays poor Mary Ann, sawdust and all, 
upon the pillow, and wants " her toof-ache 
kissed away." So Auntie kisses away the 
dolly's "toof-ache" ; and kisses the dolly's little 
mother, sometimes with a quiver on her lips, 
but more often with a smile in h eyes, and 
Faith runs back to play, and her i^ugh ripples 
out, and her mother listens — listens — 

Sometimes, too, we talk of some of the 
people for whom she caics ; of her husband's 
friends ; of her scholars, or Dr. Bland, or Clo, 
or poor 'Bin Quirk, or of somebody down town 
whom she was planning to help this winter. 
Little Clo comes in as often as she is strong 
enough to see her, and sends over untold jellies 
and blanc-manges, which Faith and I have to 
eat. "But don't let the child know that," 
Auntie says. 



236 The Gates Afar. 

But more often we talk of the life which she 
is so soon to begin ; of her husband and Roy, 
of what she will try to say to Christ; how 
much dearer He has grown to her since she 
has lain here in pain at His bidding, and how 
He helps her, at morning and at eventide and 
in the night-watches. 

We talk of the trees and the mountains and 
the lilies in the garden, on which the glory of 
the light that is not the light of the sun may 
shine ; of the " little brooks " by which she 
longs to sit and sing to Faith ; of the treasures 
of art which she may fancy to have about her ; 
of the home in which her husband may be 
making ready for her coming, and wonder 
what he has there, and if he knows how near 
the time is now. 

But I notice lately that she more often and 
more quickly wearies of these things ; that she 
comes back, and comes back again to some 
loving thought — as loving as a child's — of 
Jesus Christ. He seems to be — as she once 
said she tried that He should be to Faith — 
her "best friend." 

Sometimes, too, we wonder what it means 
to pass out of the body, and what one will be 
first conscious of. 



The Gates Ajar, 237 

"I used to have a very human, and by no 
means slight, dread of the physical pain of 
death," she said to-day ; " but, for some reason 
or other, that is slowly leaving me. I imagine 
that the suffering of any fatal sickness is worse 
than the immediate process of dissolution. 
Then there is so much beyond it to occupy 
one's thoughts. One thing I have thought 
much about ; it is that, whatever may be our 
first experience after leaving the body, it is not 
likely to be a revolutionary one. It is more 
in analogy with God's dealings that a quiet 
process, a gentle accustoming, should open 
our eyes on the light that would blind if it 
came in a flash. Perhaps we shall not see 
Him, — perhaps we could not bear it to see 
Him at once. It may be that the faces of 
familiar human friends will be the first to 
greet us ; it may be that the touch of the hu- 
man hand dearer than any but His own shall 
lead us, as we are able, behind the veil, till we 
are a I'.ttle used to the glory and the wondei, 
and lead us so to Him. 

"Be that as it may, and be heaven where 
it may, I am not afraid. With all my guess- 
ing and my studying and my dreaming )ver 
these things, I am only a child in the dark. 



238 The Gates Ajar. 

' Nevertheless, I am not afraid of the dark. 
God bless Mr. Robertson for saying that ! I 'ra 
going to bless him when I see him. How 
pleasant it will be to see him, and some other 
friends whose faces I never saw in this world. 
David, for instance, or Paul, or Cowper, or 
President Lincoln, or Mrs. Browning. The 
only trouble is that / am nobody to them I 
However, I fancy that they will let me shake 
hands with them. 

" No, I am quite willing to trust all these 
things to God. 

* And what if much be still unknown ? 
Thy Lord shall teach thee that, 
When thou shalt stand before His throne, 
Or sit as Mary sat.* 

I may find them very different from what I 
have supposed. I know that I shall find them 
infinitely more satisfying than I have supposed. 
As Schiller said of his philosophy, ' Perhaps I 
may be ashamed of my raw design, at sight of 
the true original. This may happen ; I expect 
it ; but then, if reality bears no resemblance to 
my dreams, it will be a more majestic, a more 
delightful surprise.' 

" I believe nothing that God denies. I can- 
not overrate the beauty of his promise. So 



The Gates Ajar, 239 

it surely can have done no harm for me to 
take the comfort of my fancying till I am 
there ; and what a comfort it has been to me, 
God only knows. I could scarcely have borne 
some things without it." 

" You are never afraid that anything prov- 
ing a little different from what you expect 
might — " 

" Might disappoint me ? No ; I have set- 
tled that in my heart with God. I do not 
tJdnk I shall be disappointed. The truth is, 
he has obviously not opened the gates which 
bar heaven from our sight, but he has as ob- 
viously not sJuit them ; they stand ajar, with the 
Bible and reason in the way, to keep them 
from closing ; surely we should look in as far 
as we can, and surely, if we look with rever- 
ence, our eyes will be holden, that we may 
not cheat ourselves with mirages. And, as 
the little Swedish girl said, the first time she 
saw the stars : * O father, if the wrong side 
of heaven is so beautiful, what must the right 
side be .? '" 

January. 

I write little now, for I am living too much. 
The days are stealing away and lessening one 
by one, and still Faith plays about the room, 



240 The Gates Ajar, 

• 

though very softly now, and still the cheery 
sunshine shimmers in, and still we talk with 
clasping hands, less often and more pleasantly. 
Morning and noon and evening come and go ; 
the snow drifts down and the rain falls softly ; 
clouds form and break and hurry past the win- 
dows ; shadows melt and lights are shattered, 
and little rainbows are prisoned by the icicles 
that hang from the eaves. 

I sit and watch them, and watch the sick- 
lamp flicker in the night, and watch the blue 
morning crawl over the hills ; and the old words 
are stealing down my thought : That is the 
substance, this the shadow ; that the reality^ this 
the drcanu 

I watch her face upon the pillow ; the happy 
secret on its lips ; the smile within its eyes. It 
is nearly a year now since God sent the face 
to me. What it has done for me He knows ; 
what the next year and all the years are to be 
without it. He knows, too. 

It is slipping away, — slipping. And I — 
must — lose it. 

Perhaps I should not have said what I said 
to-night ; but being weak from watching, and 
seeing how glad she was to go, seeing how all 
the peace was for her, all the pain for us, I 



The Gates Ajar, . 241 

cried, " O Auntie, Auntie, why^ can*t we go 
too ? Why caiit Faith and I ^o with you ? " 

But she answered ipe only, " Mary, He 
knows."- 

We will be brave again to-morrow. A little 
more sunshine in the room ! A little more of 
Faith and the dolly ! 

The Sabbath. 

She asked for the child at bedtime to-nighf, 
and I laid her down in her nijrht-dress on her 
mother's arm. She kissed her, and said her 
prayers, and talked a bit about Mary Ann, 
and to-morrow, and her snow man. I sat over 
by the window in the dusk, and watched a 
little creamy cloud that was folding in the 
moon. Presently their voices grew low, and 
at last Faith's stopped altogether. Then I 
heard in fragments this : — 

" Sleepy, dear 1 But you won't have many 
more talks with. mamma. Keep awake just a 
minute, Faith, and hear — can you hear } 
Mamma will never, never forget her little girl ; 
she won't go away very far ; she will always 
love you. Will you remember as long as you 
live } She will always see you, though you 
can't see her, perhaps. Hush, my darling, 
dofit cry ! Is n't God naughty ? No, God is 
II p 



242 The Gates Ajar. 

good ; God is always good. He won*t take 
mamma a great way off. One more kiss ? 
There ! now you may go to sleep. One more 1 
Come, Cousin Mary." 

June 6. 

It is a long time since I have written here. 
I did not want to open the book till I was sure 
that I could open it quietly, and could speak 
as she would like to have me speak, of what 
remains to be written. 

But a very few words will tell it all. 

It happened so naturally and so happily, 
she was so glad when the time came, and she 
made me so glad for her sake, that I cannot 
grieve. I say it from my honest heart, I can- 
not grieve. In the place out of which she has 
gone, she has left me peace. I think of some- 
thing that Miss Procter said about the open- 
ing of that golden gate, 

" round which the kneeling spirits wait. 
The halo seems to linger round those kneeling closest to 

the door : 
The joy that lightened from that place shines still upon the 

watcher's face." 

I think more often of some things that she 
herself said in the very last of those pleasant 



The Gates Ajar. 243 

talks, when, turning a leaf in her little Bible, 
she pointed out to me the words : — 

" It is expedient for you that I go away ; 
for, if I go not away, the Comforter will not 
come." 

It was one spring-like night, — the twenty- 
ninth of March. 

She had been in less pain, and had chatted 
and laughed more with us than for many a 
day. She begged that Faith might stay till 
dark, and might bring her Noah's ark and 
play down upon the foot of the bed where she 
could see her. I sat in the rocking-chair with 
my face to the window. We did not light the 
lamps. 

The night came on slowly. Showery clouds 
flitted by, but there was a blaze of golden 
r.olor behind them. It broke through and 
scattered them ; it burned them, and melted 
them ; it shot great pink and purple jets up to 
the zenith ; it fell and lay in amber mist upon 
the hills. A soft wind swept by, and darted 
now and then into the glow, and shifted it 
about, color away from color, and back again. 

" See, Faith ! " she said softly ; '' put down 
the little camel a minute, and look ! " and 
added after, but neither to the chile? nor to me, 



244 "^^^^ Gates Ajar. 

it seemed : "At eventide there shall be light" 
Phoebe knocked presently, and I went out to 
see what was wanted, and planned a little for 
Auntie's breakfast, and came back. 

Faith, with her little ark, was still playing 
quietly upon the bed. I sat down again in 
my rocking-chair with my face to the window. 
.Now and then the child's voice broke the 
silence, asking Where should she put the ele- 
phant, and was there room there for the yellow 
bird } and now and then her mother an- 
swered her, and so presently the skies had 
faded, and so the night came on. 

I was thinking that it was Faith's bedtime, 
and that I had better light the lamp, when 
a few distinct, hurried words from the bed at- 
tracted my attention. 

" Faith, I think you had better kiss mamma 
now, and get .down." 

There was a change in the voice. I was 
there in a moment, and lifted the child from 
the pillow, where she had crept. But she said, 
" Wait a minute, I\Iary ; wait a minute," — 
for Faith clung to her, with one hand upon 
her cheek, softly patting it. 

I went over and stood by the window. 

It was her mother herself who gently pat 
the little fingers away at last. 



The Gates Aj^r. 245 

" Mother's own little girl ! Good night, my 
darling, my darling." 

So I took the child away to Phoebe, and 
came back, and shut the door. 

" I thought you might have some message 
for Roy," she said. 

*' Now ? " 

" Now, I think." 

We had often talked of this, and she had 
promised to remember it, whatever It might 
be. §0 I told her — But I will not write 
what I told her. 

I saw that she was playing weakly with her 
wedding-ring, which hung very loosely below 
its little worn guard. 

" Take the little guard," she said, " and keep 
it for Faith ; but bury the other with me : he 
put it on ; nobody else must take it — " 

The sentence dropped, unfinished. • 

I crept up on the bed beside her, for she 
seemed to wish it. I asked if I should light the 
lamp, but she shook her head. The room 
seemed light, she said, quite light. She 
wondered then if Faith were asleep, and if 
she would waken earlv in the mornina:. 

After that I kissed her, and then we said 
nothing more, only presently she asked me to 
hold her hand. 



»46 The Gates Ajar. 

It was quite dark when she turned her face 
at last towards the window. 

*' John ! " she said, — " v/hy, John ! " 

« « « * 4( 

They came in, with heads uncovered and 
voices hushed, to see her, in the days while she 
was lying down stairs among the flowers. 

Once when I thought that she was alone, I 
went in, — it was at twilight, — and turned, 
startled by a figure that was crouched sobbing 
on the floor. 

" O, I want to go too, / want to go too ! " it 
cried. 

" She 's ben there all day long," said Phoebe, 
wiping her eyes, " and she won't go home for 
a mouthful of victuals, poor creetur ! but she 
jest sets there and cries and cries, an' there 's 
no stoppin' of her ! " 

It was little Clo. 

At another time, I was there with fresh 
flowers, when the door opened, creaking a 
little, and 'Bin Quirk came in on tiptoe, trying 
in vain to still the noise of his new boots. 
His eyes were red and wet, and he held out to 
me timidly a single white carnation. 

" Could you put it somewhere, where it 
w«uld n't do any harm ? I walked way over 



The Gates Ajar, 247 

to Worcester and back to get it. If you could 
jest hide it under the others out of sight, seems 
to me it would do me a sight of good to feel it 
was there, you know." 

I motioned to him to lay it himself between 
her fingers. 

" O, I dars n't. I 'm not fit, /'m not She *d 
rether have you." 

But I told him that I knew she would be as 
pleased that he should give it to her himself 
as she was when he gave her the China pinks 
on that distant summer day. So the great 
awkward fellow bent down, as simply as a child, 
as tenderly as a woman, and left the flower in 
its place. 

" She liked 'em," he faltered ; " maybe, if what 
she used to say is all so, she '11 like 'em now. 
She liked 'em better than she did machines. 
I've just got my carpet-sweeper through; I 
was thinking how pleased she 'd be ; I wanted 
to tell her. If I should go to the good place, 
— if ever I do go, it will be just her doin's, — 
I '11 tell her then, maybe, I — " 

He forgot that anybody was there, and, sob- 
bing, hid his face^n his great hands. 

So we are waiting for the morning when 



248 The Gates Ajar. 

the gates shall open, — Faith and I. I, from 
my stiller watches, am not saddened by the 
music of her life. I feel sure that her mother 
wishes it to be a cheery life. I feel sure that 
she is showing me, who will have no mother- 
hood by which to show myself, how to help 
her little girl. 

And Roy, — ah, well, and Roy, — he knows. 
Our hour is not yet come. If the Master will 
that we should be about His Father's business, 
what is that to us ? 



THE END. 



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